Adolf Friedrich Harper

Adolf Friedrich Harper

1725–1806

Harper was born in Berlin, the son of the Swedish-born court painter Johann Harper, under whom he initially studied. He subsequently trained as a portrait painter, spending part of his time in Paris, and changing to concentrate on landscape when he became Richard Wilson’s pupil in Rome in 1752. From 1754 to 1756, Harper shared rooms in Via Condotti with another follower of Wilson, Johannes Wiedewelt. Together with their friend Johan Mandelberg, who was in Rome from 1755 to 1758, they were part of a circle that included Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Harper left Rome for Stuttgart in the summer of 1756 to work at the court of Carl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg, and was closely associated there with Nicolas Guibal, who had been one of Mengs’s pupils in Rome. Harper painted many landscapes for the palace at Ludwigsburg, some of them closely based upon Wilson’s compositions, although usually executed in a much higher key, and some of these compositions reached a wider audience in the form of engravings. Harper taught landscape at the Hohe Carlsschule in Stuttgart, the first artist to teach landscape painting at a German academy. In August 1797, Harper was visited at Stuttgart by the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, on his travels back from Switzerland to Weimar, shortly after which Harper retired to Berlin. Harper left a collection of some sixty drawings in Stuttgart, mostly by himself but including at least one drawing by Wilson and copies after the French painter François Boucher. They are now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and recent study of them has provided a new understanding of Harper’s style and his activity in Rome.