This stunning depiction of an Italian girl resting in the shade of a tree is one of the most evocative and important works by the German painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter. Although today best known for his grand portraits of royals and nobles across all of Europe, Winterhalter rose to fame primarily from the romantic genre paintings that he produced during and following his residence in Italy in the 1830s. The Girl from the Sabine Hills is perhaps the most accomplished of these Italian works and constitutes a milestone in his career as one of his earliest public successes. Remarkably, it survives in what appears to be its original frame.

The subject is the figure of a sleeping girl, here portrayed in dramatic, almost intimate close-up. She is shown three-quarter length leaning against a tree, with an earthenware jug partially covered by vines by her side, a distant landscape behind her. The work is executed in a rich palette of bold colors, with brilliantly rendered details of her costume, jewelry, and headdress contrasting with the placid beauty of the subject’s features in slumber. The effect is heightened by the juxtaposition of her delicately modeled skin tones with the bravura brushwork that the artist employs in the swirl of hair escaping from the headdress, the striking gold earring articulated by rich impasto, the eagle-shaped hairpin, and the coarsely woven embroidery of the blue apron. Winterhalter’s ability to capture the tactile qualities of the disparate textiles that comprise her costume—cotton, suede, satin, and velvet—presages his mastery of depicting the elaborate gowns that bedeck the subjects in his later formal portraits.

Franz Winterhalter came from humble roots. He was born into a family of farmers in the small village of Menzenschwand in the Black Forest. At a young age he was apprenticed to the workshop of Karl Ludwig Schüler in nearby Freiburg, where he trained as a commercial draughtsman and lithographer. Winterhalter’s prodigious talent was recognized early on by the Jewish industrialist David Seligmann, Baron von Eichtal, who had established a factory in the former monastery of St. Blasien, near the artist’s birthplace. He would become Franz’s first benefactor, sponsoring his move to Munich, where in 1825 he received a grant from the Grand Duke of Baden, Ludwig I, to study at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste.

The academic training Winterhalter would receive served him well, as he soon began work with the court portraitist Joseph Karl Stieler, an artist best known today for his dynamic 1820 Portrait of Beethoven (Beethoven-Haus, Bonn). It was here that Winterhalter made his first forays into portrait painting in oils, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the principal occupation of his career. The young artist moved to Karlsruhe in 1828, where he began to work both as a professional portraitist and as the drawing instructor to Sophie, the future Grand Duchess of Baden. She was the wife of Leopold, who would succeed his half-brother Ludwig as Grand Duke in 1830 and prove to be an even more generous patron of the artist. Winterhalter served as court painter to the House of Baden in all but name (his official appointment to this position would come later) and the Grand Duke rewarded the artist by underwriting a two-year residence to study and to paint in Italy.

The “Italienische Reise”—to use the title of Goethe’s famed Italian travel journals—was considered an essential part of artistic training in the early nineteenth century. This was especially true for German artists, motivated by the influential writings of Goethe and the archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Winterhalter had yearned to make such a journey as early as 1827, but his financial situation prevented him from doing so until the receipt of Leopold’s largesse.i He set out from Karlsruhe late in 1832 and travelled through the major centers of Italy, filling sketchbooks with pencil drawings and watercolors that document his progress down the peninsula. He eventually settled in Rome in mid-1833. There he joined the thriving community of German painters, but increasingly associated himself with the circle of French artists around Horace Vernet, earning him the nickname “the Frenchman” among his fellow countrymen.ii

Although Winterhalter did paint some portraits of German diplomats and fellow artists during this period, his primary activity focused on depictions of the local populace, landscapes, and scenes of everyday life. The present work is now known as the Girl from the Sabine Hills—in German, Mädchen aus der Sabiner Bergen—after its title at the 1937 sale at Lempertz, although it has been variously titled across its history. It was first exhibited in Karlsruhe under the titles Schlafende Italienerin (“Sleeping Italian Girl”), or Unter einem Baume schlafende Albaneserin—the meaning of “Albaneserin” being rather equivocal. It may indicate that the sleeping girl is a native of the hill town of Albano, located in the Castelli Romani area just outside Rome. Winterhalter regularly sketched in the countryside around the city, both in the Sabine Hills (Colli della Sabina) north of Rome, and in the Alban Hills (Colli Albani) to the south. In fact, his Italian sketchbook, now in the possession of the artist’s descendants, preserves a watercolor depicting Albano from above.iii Alternatively, an “Albaneserin” may refer to an Albanian girl, or a girl in Albanian dress. The subject’s attire does resemble traditional Albanian wear, often characterized by a billowy white blouse covered by a bodice (much like the Austrian dirndl), although similar folk costumes were worn throughout central and southern Italy.

With his on-site drawings and watercolors Winterhalter was both refining his talents and creating a personal archive that he could later reference in his studio. His records of the vistas and people he encountered would serve as source material for the genre paintings depicting romantic idylls of Italian life. While there are no known preparatory works for the Girl from the Sabine Hills, other drawings preserved in Winterhalter’s Italian sketchbook, such as the one here illustrated, demonstrate the artist’s interest in local costumes and document the care he took in recording their minute details (Fig. 1). It is likely that Winterhalter would have drawn upon his own sketches of this type, and likely ones recording the specific dress worn by the subject, when composing the Girl from the Sabine Hills.

Winterhalter’s technical ability and style underwent a significant transformation during his time in Italy. Under the southern sun he developed a more vivid palette and a greater sensitivity to lighting effects. He also gained a more masterful handling of poses and further refined the expressive brushwork that already characterized his earlier work. The Girl from the Sabine Hills was one of the first fruits of this metamorphosis. Winterhalter skillfully renders changes in texture and color among the various components of the girl’s costume, from the billowing folds of the white sleeves, to the dark green and gold piping of her bodice and the orange ribbon binding it together, to the reds and blacks of the woven band across her blue apron, and the pale green skirt beneath. The placement of the light source at a point high at the upper right and slightly behind the figure helps to achieve a dramatic play of light and shadow across the figure. Cast almost completely in shadow, the girl is accented by bursts of light that brightly reflect off her hair, the gold stripes in her headdress, the cuff and the top of her right forearm, as well as the entire underside of her left sleeve. The two strands of her necklace are masterpieces of illusionistic rendering, as each pearl is precisely defined by subtle variations in size, reflection, and luminosity—the choker resting about and casting a shadow across the nape of her neck. The unforced combination of precise and loose brushwork is a quality that bespeaks both the artist’s confidence and his technical prowess at this moment in his career.

The pose of the figure, with her arms folded behind her head, echoes that of the Sleeping Ariadne (Fig. 2), one of the great classical exemplars for all artists visiting Rome, then and now in the Vatican. But in addition to their compositional affinities, both works share a common visual dynamic as each woman is depicted innocent in her slumber and unaware of any observer, while patently being closely examined by both artist and, later, viewer, intimately and somewhat voyeuristically.

Winterhalter painted his first genre scenes while still in Italy, as attested by the signatures on several of his canvases from this period—all variations of “Fr Winterhalter fec. / Roma 1833.” However, although he completed numerous drawings and sketches while in Italy, fully realized oil paintings executed in his Roman studio are exceptionally rare. Only five other paintings from his Italian period are known, three of which are in public collections: Roman Genre Scene (1833) in the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (Fig. 3); Girl with a Tambourine (1834) in The Vasnetzov Regional Museum of Fine Arts in Kirov; and Italian Girl Resting on a Tambourine (1834) in the Altonaer Museum in Hamburg.iv

Although the signature on the Girl from the Sabine Hills does not include an indication of its place of production, Winterhalter must have painted it in Rome, as he lent the painting to the exhibition of the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe in 1834, immediately following his return from Italy. Indeed, his sole surviving letter penned from Rome, written to his parents on 12 March 1833, states: “In one month I will send three pictures from here to Karlsruhe and will try to sell them. It is already very warm here – it is quite green and everything is in bloom. This truly is a beautiful country. I will be glad all my life that I came here.”v The latter part of this quotation has elicited comments from almost every scholar writing on the painter as it perfectly captures the huge impact that Italy had on Winterhalter’s artistic development. However, less attention has been paid to the first part of the letter. It is clear from this statement that Winterhalter was planning and finishing paintings for the domestic market in Germany while still in Rome. Furthermore, it is possible, and perhaps likely, that the present painting is one of the three works shipped from Rome back to Karlsruhe for exhibition.

Winterhalter left Rome for Karlsruhe early in 1834. The Girl from the Sabine Hills was on view in the Badischer Kunstverein exhibition in June and by August the artist had been officially appointed Court Painter to Grand Duke Leopold of Baden. The Kunstverein was a fine art institution that, like Winterhalter, had recently come under the patronage of the Grand Duke. It had acquired a permanent space through the support of Duke Leopold in 1830, and from 1832 on mounted annual public art exhibitions. According to the statutes from that year, the aim of the organization was to display and sell works of art, both directly to collectors and through a lottery among its members. The Girl from the Sabine Hills met with critical esteem during this 1834 exhibition: the reviewer for the art periodical Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände reported that Winterhalter’s painting “won the prize [for best painting] in the eyes of the public.” A year later it was still referred to as having been a “popular sensation.”vi

Despite the positive response to the Girl from the Sabine Hills and the artist’s position at court, Winterhalter soon left Karlsruhe for Paris, where he would reside for the next thirty-six years. There he continued to paint Italianate genre scenes and his first success in the city came with one—a large-scale painting titled Il Dolce Far Niente (Private Collection), exhibited at the Salon of 1836. Another work from this period, Winterhalter’s Jeune Fille de l’Ariccia of 1838 (Private Collection), evokes the same sensual atmosphere and compositional format as the present painting.vii However, Winterhalter’s portrait commissions quickly began to overshadow his narrative works, and he was engaged almost exclusively as a portraitist for the remainder of his career.

Although Winterhalter’s period as a painter of Italian genre scenes was relatively short-lived, it had two lasting effects. The first was the influence of Franz’s Italian paintings on his younger brother Hermann, also a painter. Hermann followed Franz to Paris in 1840, first working as an assistant in his brother’s studio before embarking on his own career. Indeed, it has only recently been recognized that the Young Italian Girl by the Well in the Augustinermuseum in Freiburg, long thought to be the work of Franz, is in fact a signed work by Hermann (Fig. 4).viii Another work of this type by Hermann, the Young Girl from the Sabine Hills, has also recently been identified.ix Both are thought to have been painted by Hermann in the late 1830s or 1840s and clearly rely on Franz’s works, both reference drawings made in Italy and paintings he would have known, such as the present work. Hermann never travelled to Italy, but he achieved some modest success imitating his brother’s Italian genre paintings, if never with the same verve or even compositional brilliance.

The second lasting effect of Winterhalter’s Italian period was on the style and technique of his portraits. As Eugene Barilo von Reisberg has aptly observed, as a result of his Italian sojourn and activity as a narrative painter, Winterhalter’s portraits gained “a greater sense of naturalness and corporeality…[t]hey became less mannered and posed, his color palette brighter and more luscious, the atmospheric effects clearer and more realistic, and the painterly style more fluid and vigorous.”x It was precisely these qualities of that made Winterhalter the most fashionable and sought-after portraitist in the courts of Europe, earning him the sobriquet “Fürstenmaler Europas,” Europe’s Painter of Princes.

Winterhalter’s Girl from the Sabine Hills reflects the artistic crosscurrents of the first half of the nineteenth century in Europe. The focus on materiality—of the precise and convincing rendering of dress, objects, and textures—to create a kind of heightened reality recalls the sensibilities of Biedermeier taste. Yet the painting may be seen as emerging from a Neo-Classical paradigm, not only by the compositional echo of an antique prototype, but in its nostalgic evocation of an Arcadian existence. Evident as well are qualities of the Romantic movement, given both the obvious contemporaneity of the subject and the blissful emotional state in which she is portrayed. The girl herself, putatively a simple contadina taking a nap in the middle of a hot day, is a kind of Romantic invention as her sumptuous dress, precious jewelry, perfectly composed hair, not to mention her exquisite beauty, belie her humble origins.

Copies of the Girl from the Sabine Hills:
Despite the paucity of information regarding the location and owner of the Girl from the Sabine Hills in the nineteenth century, it is clear that the work enjoyed some celebrity. The painting seems to have been known by the earliest writers on the artist, including Georg Kaspar Nagler, compiler of the Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon (1851), and the anonymous authors of the essays on Winterhalter in the Abendblatt der Wiener Zeitung (1856) and Die Dioskuren (1873). The miniature painter Johann Martin Morgenroth, painted faithful copies after the Girl from the Sabine Hills on porcelain that were sold with imitations of the original frame—two versions of which have recently appeared on the art market (Fig. 5). Each is undated but signed: “Morgenroth px: nach F. Winterhalter.”xi It is evident that Morgenroth viewed Winterhalter’s painting firsthand (and maybe painted his first porcelain replica working directly in front of it), as the colors of his work faithfully reproduce those in the original painting.

The Girl from the Sabine Hills was also copied in a handsome lithograph by Hermann Eichens (Fig. 6). Although the subscription of the print lists publishers in Paris, London, and Leipzig, only one example of the print, titled “La Siesta,” has been located. That, conserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was acquired by the library in 1845, when it was also listed in the Bibliographie de la France.xii Eichens exhibited this lithograph at the Paris Salon of 1846.xiii Eichens was born in Berlin, but, like Winterhalter was living and working in Paris in 1845.