Weirotter, Franz Edmund (Innsbruck 1730 – Vienna 1771). Aqueduct, leading to the remains of a larger property still occupied in some parts. In front of it residents and passers-by. Etching. Inscribed: F. E. Weirotter fecit / 8. 6.2 x 13.2 cm.

Nagler 8, 8. – Sheet 8 of the 24-sheet “Fifth Suite of Varied Regions of Old Buildings”, dedicated to Maria Christina, royal princess of Hungary and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria and married duchess of Saxony-Teschen.

“ (Then) far more developed we find the aqueducts with the Romans where they seldom were run underground, but mostly on arched buttresses, and belonged to the most grandiose creations of ancient architecture. The pipes were made of wood, lead, even leather, but mostly of stony canals. Normally the

pipes  leading  into  the  individual  houses  ( as  here )

… were of lead ”

(Meyer’s Konv.-Lex., 4^th ed., I, 107).

With Weirotter the landscape etching experienced a fine culmination and in 1766 Schmutzer, then director of the Vienna Academy, recommended Maria Theresa the appointment to the academy of the still young artist to take over the landscape subject there. According to Schmutzer’s report for the empress the artist in his mid-thirties made

The suggestion was accepted immediately by the Privy Council, because Weirotter otherwise “already would have a call to Saxony in hands”. But at his much too early death “his complete artistic bequest found no market in Vienna; it left to Paris. Connoisseurs and friends of his sheets

(ADB XLI [1896], 520 f.),

whereby he “developed a truly astonishing activity on both the fields assigned to him (in Vienna), the landscape drawing and the etching,

and  has  given  impetuses  influencing  still  today ”

(Thieme-Becker XXXV [1942], 309, quoting Lützow).

His whole ability is reflected by the works after  own  invention as here. His admiration with the contemporaries follows from letters by and to Wille as the German art pope residing in Paris. So Winckelmann on occasion of Weirotter’s stay in Rome “Mister Weirotter has made me … a present with own works,

which  I  reckon  among  the  best  of  the  kind

… This young artist will be a credit to his native country”. And in glance backward at the preceded Paris period of training with Wille (1759/63) this to Hagedorn in Dresden “He is so completed with drawing that his drawings look far more effortless then his paintings”. And as collector the Leipsic banker Gottfried Winckler “I have no doubt, that Mr.

Weirotter  will  deliver  to  us  many  beautiful  after  the  Italian  voyage ”.

Quoted after Decultot and others as editors, Wille Correspondence, Tübingen 1999, pp. 314, 316, 318, each from 1764.

“ Weirotter – so Gerson, (Spread and Aftereffect of the Dutch Painting of the 17^th Century, 2^nd ed., 1983, p. 338 – worked also after P. Molijn, Jan van Goyen, Aert van der Neer – and Dietricy.

His  own  inventions  are  correspondingly  Dutch . ”

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