Johann Jacob Frey (Zugeschrieben)

In 1835 Frey was able to settle in Rome, supported by the Basel patron Emilie Linder. He restlessly explored the surroundings of Rome in search of classical landscape motifs. In Munich, he had already come into contact with the landscape painting of Johann Georg von Dillis and Carl Rottmann, who propagated open-air painting; and Frey followed in their footsteps with his oil sketches in that he did not paint the landscape as such, but its individual elements: Trees, bushes, rocks and streams. This also applies to the depicted pine trees, which grew tall in the southern climate and probably provided Frey with shade during one of his tours in the hot summer months. The depiction is part of a bundle of 31 pictures found by Hans Wendland in Chicago in 1925 and attributed by him to Arnold Böcklin. The question of authorship was the subject of a sometimes bitter dispute among Böcklin scholars at the time, with Justi, Friedländer, Thormaelen, Bode, Meier-Graefe and Waldmann in favour and Heinrich Alfred Schmid, Wölfflin and Carlo Böcklin against. Hans Holenweg, who inscribed the case as an "unsolved mystery of Böcklin research" in 1998, attributed the "Wendland Paintings" to Johann Jacob Frey in 2006.