The painting “Waterfall (Stream La Pataross Alpes Maritimes)” by Joseph Planck came from the private collection of Pavel Mikhailovich Dogadin, the founder of the gallery. He inherited it in 1914 along with four artworks by European masters from the collection of his uncle Konstantin Pavlovich Dogadin. The exhibition of paintings by artists of the French, German, and Austro-Hungarian schools took place in Astrakhan in 1886 along with an exhibition of wax figures. The small-scale paintings sold very well, even though for the most part the collection represented artists that were skilled, but little-known in Russia.
Joseph Planck was born in Tyrol. He was educated in Munich. The artist specialized in history painting.
In the catalog, the painting is listed under the original title “La Pataross Alpes Maritimes”. The work has all the attributes of a romantic plot, which the artist freely introduces into a realistic landscape of a mountainous area in the Southern Alps.
Romantic artists expressed their sensual experiences in their works through the prism of their soul. Their image of nature is manifested in various forms, materials, scales, techniques, composition, color and drawing, — for Romanticism does not and cannot have a ready-made creative formula or canon. For the artists, landscape is a mood, an echo of human passions. In contrast to the image of eternal and immobile nature, preferred by Classicists, the masters of the Romantic era used an excited and vivid artistic technique that allowed them to express their poetic fantasies and their vision of the world, on the verge of the real and imaginary.
Planck’s style is distinguished by the richness of dull and dark tones, and the trembling texture, which expresses his romantic mood.
