A Winter Landscape & A Cave Near Naples.

Two gouache paintings firmly attributed to Barbara Regina Dietzsch (1706-1783), a winter landscape at dawn with peasants and a journeyman beginning their day, offered together with a view near Naples, travellers passing through a cave with an abandoned caryatid.

Painted in gouache on vellum and within period gilt gesso frames. The works approx: 8.5 inches x 6.25 inches o.s: 14.25 inches x 12.25 inches

Thanks to Chris Coles, BADA recommended researcher, these two works have recently been correctly attributed to Barbara Regina Dietzsch. The vast majority of her works are the highly respected paintings she was to become famous for, of flowers and plants often with still-life additions of snails, moths and other insects. Much of her other work is hidden beneath an overwhelming catalogue of these still-lives, perhaps often hidden by being wrongly attributed to other artists.

However, Mr. Coles was able to direct us to four paintings held in the National Gallery of Denmark; two Neopolitan cave scenes, a landscape under a wintery moon, and a stormy seascape; the first three remarkably similar to the two offered here. Barbara Regina Dietzsch was born in Nuremberg in 1706, married the painter Nikolaus Christopher Matthes and resided in Hamburg, before eventually returning to Nuremberg where she died in May of 1783. Her works sold in Germany, England, Holland and France, were extensively engraved and used to illustrate botanical text books. Her father Johann Israel, brother Johann Christoph, and sister Margareta were all artists employed by the City of Nuremberg Courts. The physician and botanist, Christophe Jacob Trew, was an important patron of the Dietzsch family and of the wider circle of botanical artists in Nuremberg during the eighteenth century. Dietzsch was the teacher of Ernst Friedrich Karl Lang (1748-1782) and his paintings, many of birds, clearly show her influence on his art. Notable works include A Dandelion with a Tiger Moth, a Butterfly, a Snail, and a Beetle, held in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Dandelion, at J. Paul Getty Museum, and A tulip, a butterfly of the species Arctia caja (garden tiger moth), and a beetle (possibly a longhorn), recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.