On the Pedernales River

Hermann Lungkwitz arrived in Texas in 1851 as part of the wave of German liberal emigres who settled the Hill Country following the failed revolutions of 1848. Trained at the Düsseldorf Academy under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, he brought with him the Düsseldorf School tradition of disciplined plein-air landscape study, precise topographic observation and a reverence for regional terrain as a worthy subject in its own right. Where his American contemporaries of the Hudson River School were painting the sublime grandeur of the Rockies or the Adirondacks, Lungkwitz directed that same attentiveness toward the quieter drama of the Texas Edwards Plateau: its cedar and live oak, its spring-fed rivers cutting through pale limestone, its particular quality of afternoon light. He is now regarded as the first significant landscape painter to document the Texas Hill Country, and works such as this one constitute a visual record of the region before settlement transformed it. The Pedernales River appears in several canvases from his most productive period in the 1860s and 1870s, when he was based in San Antonio and making regular sketching expeditions into the surrounding countryside.