Johann Nepomuk Hoechle: life and works

Johann Nepomuk Hoechle (16 September 1790, Munich – 12 December 1835, Vienna) was an Austrian painter and lithographer who specialized in scenes from military goings-on and current events.

His dad was Johann Baptist Hoechle (1754-1832), an artist from Switzerland who difficult became court painter for the Habsburgs. When he was yet a child, he was apprenticed to the engraver and etcher, Ferdinand Kobell, who died quickly after, in 1799. The once year, his dad took him to Vienna. From 1804 to 1808, he was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied chronicles painting similar to Heinrich Friedrich Füger and landscape painting later than Michael Wutky. His future career as a battle painter probably came from the impinge on of the French marine and military artist, Ignace Duvivier (1758-1832), who Hoechle met though he was visiting Vienna.

This may be what inspired Hoechle, in 1809, to make sketches of the ongoing Battle of Aspern from a hillside near Heiligenstadt. He was found and arrested by French soldiers, who thought he was a spy and were going to have him shot. Luckily, he spoke French and was practiced to persuade the commanding executive that they were mistaken.

In 1814, after additional studies in military art, he made more sketches at the scenes of major events, on behalf of Austrian Emperor Francis I, and turned them into paintings at his studio. His most important performance from this period, and his best-known overall, depicts the crossing of the Vosges Mountains, following Napoleon’s crush at the Battle of Leipzig.

In 1819, he accompanied the Emperor’s entourage to Italy, followed in 1820 by attendance at major military maneuvers in Hungary. That similar year, he did a portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven and, shortly after the composer’s death in 1827, made a detailed sketch of his study (where he died) in the “Schwarzspanierhaus”.

In 1833, he was fixed to succeed his daddy as court painter, but died deserted two years later.