Jacob Philipp Hackert | |
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Hackert, painted by Augusto Nicodemo, 1797
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Born |
Prenzlau |
15 September 1737
Died | 28 April 1807 San Pietro di Careggi, near Florence |
(aged 69)
Education | Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin |
Known for | Painting |
Movement | Classicism |
Patron(s) | Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies |
Jacob Philipp Hackert (15 September 1737 – 28 April 1807) was a landscape painter from Brandenburg, who did most of his work in Italy.
Hackert was born in 1737 in Prenzlau in the Margraviate of Brandenburg (now in Germany). He trained with his father Philipp (a portraitist and painter of animals) and his uncle, before going to the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1758. Later he traveled to Swedish Pomerania and , where he painted murals.
He spent from 1765 to 1768 in Paris with the Swiss artist Balthasar Anton Dunker, where he focused on painting in gouache. He met and was inspired by Claude Joseph Vernet, who was already famous as a painter of landscapes and seascapes, and the German engraver Johann Georg Wille.
In 1768 Hackert left Paris with his brother Georg, and went to Italy, basing himself mainly in Rome and Naples, where he produced many works for Sir William Hamilton. He travelled all over Italy, gaining a reputation as a talented landscape painter. He became famous everywhere in Europe due to his works for Catherine the Great, the cycle of paintings about Battle of Chesma, and Pope Pius VI.
In 1786 he went to work for Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in Naples. He advised on the creation of a painting restoration laboratory at the Museo di Capodimonte,suggesting the call from Rome to the court of Naples of the restorer Federico Anders and supervised the transfer of the Farnese collections from Rome to Naples. During this period he acted also as a secret informant of Russia, his contact being the Russian diplomat Andrey Razumovsky.