Exhibition on the landscape painter August Seidel in Rosenheim

Hout of the academies, art clubs and studios, into the mountains and into idealized country life. Like many of his painting contemporaries, August Mauritius Seidel, born in 1820, son of a royal general postal administration auditor in Munich, traveled with his outdoor equipment through the foothills of the Alps and the Alps, from Berchtesgaden across the Blue Land to Garmisch and down to Lake Garda – sketchbooks, Easel, palette, stick seat, brush and screw bottle in the luggage.

The pencil sketches became watercolors or oil sketches, sometimes only many years later into a finished oil painting in the studio. If it was well received on the art market, a cheaper, less carefully executed second version was painted at the customer's request. The motifs still have names that resonate today – the Biberhöhe near Brannenburg, the shore of Lake Starnberg, the former hermitage and later Weber inn on the wall in Oberaudorf. Seidel's art historical role models – as for his predecessors Carl Rottmann and Johann Georg von Dillis – were Claude Lorrain and Jacob van Ruisdael as well as the Barbizon school

Pictures were created that convey an exaggerated image of Bavaria and that city dwellers liked to buy. They remained in manageable formats that fit on the walls of middle-class apartments. They have titles such as “Morning in the Mountains”, “Alm by Moonlight”, “Mountain Landscape”, “Waterfall in the Gorge”, “Oak Landscape”.

Seidel's artistic trips focused on mountains, alpine pastures, lakes and forests, always in search of “natural truth” and “idyllic simplicity”. August often travels with his brother Franz, who is also a painter and is two years older than him, in carriages, on horseback, mostly on foot, visiting artists' colonies on Lake Starnberg and Ammersee and in the Inn Valley, traveling from Bad Gastein to Garmisch and Verona, towards the end of the century by train to Paris.

Why Rosenheim – and not Munich? In 1904, the year August Seidel died, the Rosenheim senior teacher Max Bram bequeathed his collection of four hundred pictures to his hometown – on the condition that it build an exhibition hall. Bram becomes an honorary citizen, but the building for the collection does not open until 1938, built by German Bestelmeyer, a National Socialist architect who was given a state funeral in 1942 at Hitler's request.

As a relative of the Munich Haus der Kunst, the building stands directly next to the engine shed, Rosenheim's large exhibition building. With three exhibitions a year and a focus on contemporary art, the city positions itself respectably here.

The majority of the more than a hundred exhibits come from three private collections, the most prominent of which is that of the Munich rocket engineer and donor Robert Schmucker and his wife Renate. Schmucker also finances the August Seidel research center in the Gärtnerplatzviertel.

In addition to Seidel and his brother, more than three dozen contemporaries are on display, including Carl Spitzweg, Christian Morgenstern, Johann Friedrich Voltz, Ludwig Sckell, and Eduard Schleich the Elder. Only one woman is on board, the Viennese Tina Blau-Lang.

Strikingly, dating was not possible for many of the images. Seidel stuck strictly to depicting natural beauty and idyll. Humans, if they appear at all, are in harmony with nature. But most of the pictures are deserted, occasionally there are deer or cows, a team of oxen and occasionally tiny figures on the back, which serve as a point of identification in the midst of magnificent nature and inspire the viewer to marvel.

Nevertheless, Monika Hauser-Mair, the director of the municipal gallery, “wants to tell a story with the exhibition that the pictures don’t actually tell.” It is the history of social reality that Seidel's pictures deny – the hard life of the peasantry.

You have to think about that or derive it from the accompanying texts. After all, the gallery director hoped that the images could tempt people to make a comparison with the current state of the landscape. This is rather sobering in the battered Inn Valley with its dense network of roads, tracks, power lines and commercial areas. The idyll only exists here in places.

August Seidel's successes on the art market were subject to fashion, and after 1886 things no longer went well for him commercially. Until he concentrated on his city and created two hundred cityscapes with rough brushstrokes using the “Leaves of Old Munich”. Images that still have their impact today, images that not only Karl Valentin appreciated. Munich still couldn't bring itself to name a street after August Seidel.

Longing-blue distance! The Munich landscape painter August Seidel (1820–1904) and companions. Municipal Gallery Rosenheim, until May 12th. The catalog published by Konrad-Verlag costs 24.80 euros.