Goethe-Gallery

Enlightenment and Sensibility

Christian Georg Schütz was also one of the painters patronized by Count Thoranc while he was quartered at Goethe’s parental house. Among other works he was commissioned with the two vertical-format paintings in which Schütz combined antiquizing ruins, landscape, and lush vegetation in an idealizing form, all enveloped in soft, hazy light. The figure staffage was executed by the painters Johann Conrad Seekatz and Friedrich Wilhelm Hirt, a kind of collaboration that was quite common at the time.