The Studio of the Sculptor Rudolf Schadow

This oil sketch by Carl Blechen shows the entrance to the studio of his friend Rudolf Schadow, in the Via delle Quattro Fontane in Rome. Like many other artists, Schadow had moved to the Eternal City to study. There, he took over the atelier of Christian Daniel Rauch in 1811. Rauch, like Blechen himself, had been a pupil of Rudolf Schadow’s father, Johann Gottfried Schadow. Blechen’s oil sketch affords a glimpse of the contours of a sculpture through the door of the studio, this most likely being Schadow’s unfinished work Dancing Bacchanal, which was left there after his premature death in 1822. Blechen’s undated oil sketch was executed by the time the atelier was owned by Emil Wolff, a nephew and pupil of Johann Gottfried Schadow. It remains open as to whether this piece was painted in Rome in 1829 or in Berlin in 1830. Whereas the loose brushwork speaks more in favor of a hasty oil sketch made on location, the purposefully construed perspective and the subtle play of light and shade suggest a work that had been thought through in the studio. It is known that Blechen gave the oil sketch to Johann Gottfried Schadow as a gift in 1830. For the elder Schadow, this had particular meaning, for it served both as a memento of his own time in Rome and as a memory of his late son.