Paintings Drawings Sculptures 2016 - Jean Luc Baroni

Zimmermann came from a family of painters and
was largely self-taught but he went on to become
a professor at the Academies of Fine Art in Munich
and Dresden and with his fellow-painter brothers,
set up a school for landscape painting in Munich.
He specialised in landscape views, mostly of Bavaria
and Italy, in a heroic style inspired by the German
Romantic movement. There are works by him in the
museums of Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Dresden and
Vienna. Though his travels are unrecorded, he does
appear to have looked beyond Europe, and with a
small number of particularly fine views of Egyptian
monuments and desert travellers shows an imaginative
engagement with Ancient life which is an extension
of his romantic vision. Another example is the
large-scale view of the Pyramids of Giza, which was
donated to the Bradford Museum of Art in England in
1879. In the present works however, Zimmermann has
used the smaller scale and smooth surface of panels to
make exquisite studies of light and, in common with
the Italian Macchiaioli artists, he chose an elongated
width to give a striking, panoramic effect.
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