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Show 94 tendency to concentrate on the pathos and sublimity of the more sculptural and architectural elements found in nature. From its beginning the German neoclassical movement was saturated with romanticism, with its emphasis on moods and feelings, gothic mystery, and its ties to the dim, semimythical origins of the Germanic culture. While the pragmatic French neoclassicists turned exclusively to the heroic human form, it was an inward-brooding, contemplative attitude toward nature and the direct expression of emotion that often inspired German painters. Bodmer, thus exposed to the combined influences of such men as Goethe, Winckelmann, and Rousseau, received his technical training from his maternal uncle, Johann Jacob Meier, a competent, if unremarkable, watercolorist and etcher.18 Together with his older brother Rudolf, Bodmer lived and worked with Meier, developing his painting and etching skills, as he accompanied Meier on his frequent tours around Switzerland. Interestingly, Meier's work was representative of a subcurrent in the neoclassical and romantic movements that was particular to Switzerland. Picturesque landscapes of a more prosaic variety, which derived from the Dutch seventeenth-century landscape tradition, emphasized a realistic, rather than a poetic interpretation of nature. Romantic elements were still evident in these landscapes. Certainly the choice of subject~a ruined castle perched on a hillside, for example-had much in common with the more dramatic gothic landscapes of the German romantics to the north. But rather than brooding figures contemplating the transience of man's influence on nature, the people of these paintings were generally quaint or commonplace-woodcutters, hunters, tradespeople, or tourists.19 |