House by a Pond Albrecht Durer Date: c.1496 Style: Northern Renaissance Genre: landscape Watercolour and gouache on paper 21 x 23 cm British Museum, London
A 'weierhaus'; a timber-framed building (probably a fisherman's house) on a mound with trees at the centre of a lake, a punt in the left foreground.
Dürer painted this watercolour soon after his return from Venice, probably in 1496. The site has been identified as a pond which was connected by a small canal to the River Pegnitz, near St John's Church on the outskirts of Nuremburg. The composition is based around the circular form of the pond, a shape echoed by the carefully-painted boat in the foreground. The dark threatening clouds of the evening sky contrast with the calm water and its reflections.
The watercolour is inscribed, `House by a Pond'. The tall house, set on an island, probably served as a look-out post and a summer retreat in peacetime. Two years later Dürer depicted the same house, in reverse, in the background of his engraving of The Madonna with the Monkey.
This drawing was made at the same period as 'Landscape with a Woodland Pool' (Sl, 5218-167) and 'Mills on the river Pegnitz' in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale; Strauss 1496/7). They belong to a group of drawings which all represent the countryside around Nuremberg and were probably made soon after Dürer returned from his first visit to Italy in 1497 (see 1895,0915.975 for recent discussion about the date of his first Italian visit). The small building has been identified from an atlas published by Paul Pfinzinger about 1595 (Nuremberg, Staatsarchiv ) as the 'Weyerhäusslein' at St Johannis, which in Dürer's day was just outside the city walls, but now is a suburb of Nuremberg. A distant view of St Johannis is seen in another of Dürer's watercolours of this date, 'View of Nuremberg' formerly in Bremen ( Strauss 1496/1). The 'weierhaus' appears in the reverse sense in the background of Dürer's engraving of the 'Virgin and Child with a Monkey' of c.1498 (Meder 30), see E,4.68.
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