Johann Liss

Lys, Jan
Pan

German, c. 1597 - 1631

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Baroque painter (1597–1630)

Explore Selected Works

Edouard Vuillard, Johann Liss, Motherhood (Maternité), 1896, color lithograph on Japanese paper, Gift of Frank R. and Jeannette H. Eyerly, 1994.63.2

Motherhood (Maternité)

Edouard Vuillard, Johann Liss · 1896 · color lithograph on Japanese paper ·  Accession ID  1994.63.2

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.
Johann Liss, The Satyr and the Peasant, possibly c. 1623/1626, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.39

The Satyr and the Peasant

Johann Liss · possibly c. 1623/1626 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1942.9.39

Bibliography

1940

  • Steinbart, Kurt. Johann Liss. Berlin, 1940.

1975

  • Antoniazzi, Elisabetta. "Addenda: La data di morte di Johann Liss." Arte Veneta 29 (1975): 306.

  • Johann Liss. Exh. cat. Rathaus, Augsburg; The Cleveland Museum of Art. Augsburg, 1975.

1979

  • Amelung, Peter. "Die Stammbücher des 16./17. Jahrhunderts als Quelle der Kultur-und Kunstgeschichte." Zeichnung in Deutschland. Deutsche Zeichner 1540-1640. 2 vols. Exh. cat. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1979-1980: 2:221, note 36.

1993

  • Hand, John Oliver, with the assistance of Sally E. Mansfield. German Paintings of the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1993: 120.