Fingal Liberating Conbana

Between 1800–02 and 1803–05, Joseph Anton Koch produced two large bodies of preparatory drawings for prints for a proposed illustrated text of a famed cycle of pagan Celtic ballads. These ballads, supposedly composed and sung by the poet Ossian, celebrated the exploits of the hero Fingal. While the Ossian odes aroused great interest among French and German Romantic intellectuals at the time, the texts were, in truth, an 18th-century forgery written from fragmentary medieval sources by the Scottish poet James Macpherson. Thirty-seven commercially etched plates were ultimately produced from Koch’s drawings around 1812, but these were not published at the time for lack of financial backing. Koch himself etched this composition and another plate as illustrations for his planned publication of the Works of Ossian. The fine-line technique of this plate is characteristic of the new Romantic etching and engraving style that the Nazarenes—the German and Austrian artistic circle living in Rome from 1810—perfected in their striving to restore the classic purity of earlier masters of line-engraving in late medieval Germany and Renaissance Italy. Though remembered mainly as a Neo-Classical artist, Koch’s Ossian print cycle shows him at his most Romantic moment.