Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Franz Anton Steinberg
Slovene; 18th-century
Ljubljana, Slovenia: National Gallery of Slovenia
67%
Fishing on Lake Cerknica. 1714. Oil on canvas
There's not much of a Slovene painting tradition, but this Flemish-looking landscape (shades of various Brueg[h]els, Jan and especially, obviously, Pieter) is nice. If it doesn't quite distinguish itself from earlier Northern painting (what's now Slovenia was a Habsburg outpost for centuries, after all), it at least makes good on its author's technical incapacities. For one, the sloppy brushwork and hazy limning in the snowy mid- and background gives the sharp-cut figures nearer the front of the picture a nice distinctness. While there's none of that Bruegellian hidden logic to the dispersion of characters, they appear so diffuse throughout the foreground as to circumvent the need for order. The drinkers in the lower left corner, in front of the image-bracketing tree, are a nice touch, even if the way they announce the basic fiction of painting doesn't seem called for by much else in the scene. (TFS, 2025)