Rock cleft with cows

Feuerbach's 1855 'Rock Cleft with Cows' at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin is among his rare pure landscape paintings — the great majority of his output was figure-centered. The work belongs to his pre-Rome period, painted while he was still forming his approach and not yet certain that the melancholy classical figure would become his signature subject. German landscape painting in the 1850s was dominated by the Düsseldorf school's precise naturalism and by the lingering influence of Caspar David Friedrich's symbolically charged landscapes; Feuerbach's modest animal-in-landscape subject sits outside both traditions, suggesting a private exercise in observation rather than a statement of programmatic intent. Cows in a rocky landscape is a subject associated with both Dutch seventeenth-century pastoral painting and the more intimate observations of Barbizon painters, who were increasingly influential on progressive German painters in the 1850s.

The rocky landscape with cattle required Feuerbach to engage with the rendering of geological forms — the texture and mass of rock, the shadow within a cleft — that rarely appear in his figure paintings.