Stephan Leopold 1826–1890

Cottages, around 1865

oil on canvas, 35 × 39 cm, frame, signed. PD ST Professionally restored.
Adolf Kosárek was the greatest landscape painter of the so-called Haushofer School, which was a landscape class at the Prague Academy, which in 1844-1866 led by Bavarian professor Maxmilián Haushofer after Antonín Mánes. In addition to Kosárek, Julius Mařák, Bedřich Havránek and and Leopold Stephan. He excelled in drawing care and preparation of composing a studio-type painting - a rare preserved in the National Gallery is a convolute of about twenty small oil paintings, where we can see the preparatory stage of a nal painting. This was usually at least a metre in length. format, but more than once twice that. The chamber-like but carefully executed painted painting of the Cottage dating from around 1865 shows this painter as a mature landscape painter who had been trained by Haushofer enriched his training considerably with influences from the then-famous Düsseldorf School. Stephan has a characteristic conception of trees in a circular manner up to ornamental look, he chooses dense greens and browns, the whole is unified with a golden varnish. He belongs to the contemporary stream of European cosmopolitan landscape romanticism.