Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (Biberach an der Riß, March 23, 1609 – Augsburg, 1684) (attr.), Noblewoman on Horseback near a Tavern and Dice Players

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (Biberach an der Riß, March 23, 1609 – Augsburg, 1684) (attr.) Noblewoman on Horseback near a Tavern and Dice Players (2) Oil on canvas, 98 x 74.5 cm Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (Biberach an der Riß, March 23, 1609 – Augsburg, 1684) was a German painter and engraver, very active also in Italy. He was the eldest son of Johann Baptist Schönfeld and Susanna Schumacher. His father, a successful goldsmith, was mayor of Biberach an der Riß, and his family once belonged to the nobility. The artist trained in his homeland with the painter Johann Sichelbein of Memmingen: of this very early segment of the artist's activity, only the charcoal sketch on paper for a Diana signed and dated 1626 remains. Towards the end of the 1620s, the then young painter was in Stuttgart, at the ducal court, as was Johann Wilhelm Baur, engraver and miniaturist, whom he would later meet again in Rome. From 1633 he stayed for a long time in Italy, not only because of the Thirty Years' War, which in those years bloodied central Europe and greatly hindered the art market in the Germanic countries, but also for the fascination exerted by the peninsula, perceived in German lands as a destination for intellectual pilgrimages. He was first in Rome, where he was influenced by the classicist tendencies of Nicolas Poussin and the Baroque decorativism of Pietro da Cortona, then, from 1638, in Naples, where he made his own, reinterpreting it, the Caravaggio-inspired luminism of Bernardo Cavallino. During the Roman period, he frequented other German artists, including Joachim von Sandrart and Johann Wilhelm Baur. He painted a Visitation (circa 1647), now lost, for the Church of Sant'Elisabetta de' Fornari, owned by the German bakers in Rome. He was also under the protection of Paolo Giordano II Orsini. Returning to Swabia in 1652 (after the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 the art market had recovered), he settled in Augsburg, where he enjoyed considerable success both among private collectors and among ecclesiastical patrons: his is the altarpiece of the Assumption of the city's cathedral. Numerous are also his paintings with historical and mythological subjects (now mostly preserved in Dresden, Vienna and St. Petersburg). The artist from Biberach an der Riß is considered by today's critics one of the most eminent German painters of the Baroque era, who, with the luminosity of his touch and the delicacy of color, anticipated some aspects of Rococo art in Germany. The two beautiful canvases in question could constitute the second version of two paintings particularly well known with regard to the pictorial corpus of the German artist, the Lady on Horseback near a Tavern of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (inv. Gemäldegalerie, 6301), which became part of the collections of the prestigious Viennese institution in 1915, and The Soldiers Playing Dice from the collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein, acquired by the royalty of the small Central European state as early as 1697, a few years after the artist's death, testifying to the great critical fortune of the German painter already from the second half of the seventeenth century.