Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder

(Haina 1722-1789 Kassel)

Gamblers at the 'Ridotto' (Palazzo Dandolo, Venice) with a self portrait of Tischbein

Oil on canvas, dimensions: 108.6 x 194.9 cm


This spectacular picture represents an extraordinary moment in mid-eighteenth century European taste and in the artistic relationship between Venice and Northern Europe. Johann Heinrich Tischbein I belonged to the most productive dynasty of painters that emerged in rococo Germany. Many German painters, like their French and English counterparts, were drawn to Italy, with Mengs, Maron and Hackert a generation later being the most obvious examples. What is remarkable in the case of Tischbein is that a relatively brief sojourn culminates in a picture that so uniquely recalls an aspect of Venetian life that no native painter described in the same terms, thus capturing for posterity the world of gaming in Venice, the Ridotto, the world through which Casanova cuts so determined a swath.

Tischbein received his early training in Germany, from his elder brother, Johann Valentin Tischbein, among others. Paris exerted a strong influence on the visual arts at the courts of Germany, so it was perfectly natural for an aspirant painter to further his studies in Paris. Tischbein went there in 1743 and had the prescience to attach himself to the establishment of Carl van Loo. Now somewhat overlooked, van Loo was a sensible choice as a mentor, a painter of unfailing competence and matching intelligence. Tischbein had much to learn, and spent five years in Paris. In 1748, however, he set out for Italy. He spent eight months in Venice and then moved by way of Bologna and Florence to Rome. In 1751 he returned north to Venice, via Parma and Piacenza, for a nine-month sojourn. Back in Venice, his main interest was in contemporary developments, of course.

The greatest Venetian master of the time, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, was fully committed in Wurzburg and - not that their work was of particular interest to Tischbein - the great view painters were also absent, with Canaletto based in London and Bellotto in the North. The one painter of European rank who maintained a productive studio in Venice was Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. As Pavanello has shown (op. cit., p. 79), Tischbein studied in Piazzetta’s workshop, preparing a number of carefully drawn sheets of academic nudes.

Tischbein’s first biographer, Joseph Friedrich Engelschall, noted in 1797 that Tischbein painted two pictures while in Venice – a group portrait of a musical society and a carnival scene.

Pavanello argues that the present, evidently very much more ambitious, picture was executed either in Venice or shortly after Tischbein’s return to Germany.

The picture was first recorded in 1931 as being painted by Pietro Longhi, whose characteristic genre groups are of course wholly different both in scale and character. When the picture resurfaced in 1984 it was ascribed to Lorenzo Tiepolo, son of Giovanni Battista, whose reputation rests on the extraordinary pastels he executed in Spain, but whose oeuvre has still not been defined satisfactorily.

Pavanello’s attribution to Tischbein is incontestable. As Pavanello demonstrates, the man on the right, seen in the act of raising his tricorn, is the artist who is shown at approximately the same age in the sensitive self-portrait, generally dated between 1752 and 1755 at Kassel. The girl beside him can be identified as the artist’s wife, Marie-Sophie Robert (1726-1759), whose father was a prominent member of the French community at Kassel. They married in 1756 and Marie-Sophie is the subject of three portraits, the first dating from 1756 in Berne (Kunstmuseum), the second from 1757 in Berlin (Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie) and the third in Kassel (Museumslandschaft Hessen-Kassel). The portrait in this picture is presumably the earliest of the sequence.

It was in this same context that the Self-portrait with red cloak and mask was painted, a work in private collection dating from 1753 that recurs almost identically in the large-format mask scene (cf. Flohr, G 164).

Around 1780, the artist once again included this attractive theme in a painting, namely in Mask scene with Kassel personages (Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Neue Galerie). This painting is likewise in large format, and originally hung in the artist’s home, where it was mounted in a wall decoration along with portraits of his daughters and family. Here, too, the characters portrayed are playing the “Pharo” or “Pharao” card game (French: “Pharaon”), one of the most widespread card games of the 18th and 19th century. The game takes its name from the fact that one of the kings in the game is portrayed as a pharaoh, and that this card was considered particularly auspicious. The “banker” dealing the cards, the unmasked man wearing an allonge wig, the oriental man standing and the back figure shown in a red cloak are all drawn from the mask scene painted between the middle and the end of the 1750s.


Although gaming was ubiquitous in Europe, it had particular importance in Venice, where the Ridotto was a state monopoly with designated rooms in the Palazzo Dandolo. The most accurate visual records of the Sal Grande del Ridotto are by Francesco Guardi.

While the artist’s marriage may not establish a terminus post quem of 1756, his wife’s inclusion might suggest that the picture was conceived after Tischbein’s return to Germany from Italy. It may thus be that its distinction from the general run of commissions executed from 1753 in the artist’s capacity as court painter to Landgraf Wilhem VIII of Hesse at Kassel may, in part, reflect the rather different nature of the subject. Whether the picture was conceived in Venice or in Germany, it is a marvellous expression of the complex pattern of European artistic relationships, and may be regarded as Tischbein’s absolute masterpiece.


Provenance

  • Karl Kraibach, Bratislava (Pressburg) 1931, ‘Pietro Longhi’
  • Pietro Scarpa, Venice 1985, ‘Lorenzo Tiepolo’


Exhibition

  • Venice, Casino Municipale di Venezia, Fanti e denari. Sei secoli di giochi d’azzardo a Venezia, 15 January-28 April 1989, no. 156, as Lorenzo Tiepolo.
  • Fanti e denari. Sei secoli di giochi d’azzardo a Venezia, Venice, 1989, pp. 39-42 and p. 183, no. 156, as ‘Lorenzo Tiepolo’.
  • D. Meijers, Exhibition catalogue, De gouden schemer van Venetik: een portret van de Venetiaanse adel in de achttiende eeuw, ‘s-Gravenhage, 1991, pp. 160-2, no. 147, illustrated inside and on the cover.
  • Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum, De gouden schemer van Venetië. Een portret van de Venetiaanse adel in de achttiende eeuw, 19 February-20 May 1991, no. 147 as Lorenzo Tiepolo
  • I. Artemieva, et al., Exhibition catalogue, Il mondo di Giacomo Casanova. Un Veneziano in Europa, 1725 - 1798, Venice, 1998, pp. 197 and 241, no. 283.
  • Venice, Ca’Rezzonico, Il mondo di Giacomo Casanova. Un Veneziano in Europa, 1725-1798, September 1998-January 1999, no. 283.

References

  • G. Pavanello, ‘Johann Heinrich Tischbein, un pittore tedesco del Settecento a Venezia’, Arte Veneta, 45, 1993, pp. 79-85
  • Anna-Charlotte Flohr, Johann Heinrich Tischbein d. Ä. (1722-1789) als Porträtmaler, Munich 1997, cat. no. G 163
  • Cat. Johann Heinrich Tischbein d.Ä (1722-1789), Neue Galerie Kassel, cat. no 30
  • Cat. Spätbarock und Klassizismus, Bestandskatalog der Gemälde in den Staatlichen Museen Kassel, Kassel 2003, cat. no 236, 237, 239 and 253.


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