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Order Artwork Replica The Satyr and the Peasant, 1626 by Johann Liss (1597-1630, Germany) | ArtsDot.com

The Satyr and the Peasant

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Shown from the about the thighs up, a man, a woman holding a swaddled baby, and a satyr, which has a man’s torso and goat’s legs, sit and stand around a table in a deeply shadowed room, filling this horizontal painting. All the people have light skin and dark hair, and are lit dramatically from our left. To our left, the bare-chested satyr faces our right in profile as he leans toward the table, looking up at the woman. He wears a crown of leaves and has a dark goatee. Almost lost in shadow, a sable-brown horn juts up from his temple. Light falls across his bare shoulders, and his hands and neck are ruddy. Another ring of leaves encircles his waist over the silvery-gray fur of his goat’s legs. He holds his left hand, farther from us, in front of his chest with his open palm facing the couple to our right. His other hand rests at the top of a wooden staff behind his right hip, closer to us. The staff disappears behind a wood plank resting across at least one barrel, which presumably acts as the bench on which he sits on or hovers slightly over. The second man sits at the table to our right, his back mostly to us as he looks over his left shoulder, up toward the satyr, with his face in profile. One brow is cocked over the dark eye we can see, and he has a prominent nose and a mustache. He wears a loose-fitting, long-sleeved, white garment tied around the waist. He blows across a soup spoon held to his lips, his cheeks puffed. He leans on his other arm, which rests on the tabletop near a blue bowl. Across the table, behind the seated man, a woman looks back at the satyr from the corners of her eyes, her coral-red lips curled up in a smile. Her body faces our left and she tilts her head to her left, our right, as she turns her face down toward that shoulder. Her dark brown hair is pulled up and back, and she wears an olive-green wrap over a white shirt. The baby she holds leans away from her chest to twist and look back at the satyr as well. A few details eventually emerge from the deeply shadowed background, including a fourth person tucked into the lower left corner, who looks back over a shoulder at us or the group. Light rims the corner of a window cut from a stone wall, and a few ceramic dishes and cups line two shelves to our right behind the woman.
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Johann Liss

Johann Liss (c. 1590 or 1597 - 1629 or 1630) was a leading German Baroque painter of the 17th century, active mainly in Venice.
Liss was born in Oldenburg (Holstein) in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. After an initial education in his home state, he continued his studies, according to Houbraken, with Hendrick Goltzius in Haarlem and Amsterdam. Around 1620 he travelled through Paris to Venice. He moved to Rome around 1620–1622, and his first works there were influenced by the style of Caravaggio.
Although his earlier work was concerned with the contrasts of light and shadow, his final move to Venice in the early 1620s modified his style and gave impetus to brilliant color and a spirited treatment of the painted surface.In 1627, he was created an admired large altarpiece, the Inspiration of Saint Jerome in San Nicolò da Tolentino. His loose brushstrokes seem precursor to rococo styles of Guardi brothers.This final style, along with that of other "foreign" painters residing in Venice, Domenico Fetti and Bernardo Strozzi, represent the first inroads of Baroque style into the republic.
Liss fled to Verona to escape the plague spreading in Venice, but succumbed there prematurely in 1629. According to Houbraken, he worked day and night on his paintings, so that Joachim von Sandrart felt that his health was at risk and urged him to join him in Rome.
His legacy is as a painter of both sensuous mythological and pious biblical subjects, a master of colors and Baroque painting. He was most influential to Venetian 18th-century painters like Sebastiano Ricci, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Giovanni Piazzetta.
Joachim von Sandrart wrote in 1675 that "because he fared well in Venice, he soon returned there ... he died along with many others during the plague that began in 1629."

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