It was not until Friedrich Nehrlich traveled to Italy in 1828 that he began to use the name Friedrich Nerly. Born in Erfurt, he went to live with relatives in Hamburg after the death of his father, where, in 1823, he met the man who would later become his patron, Baron Carl Friedrich von Rumohr. Nerly accompanied him to Florence, from where he left for Rome at the beginning of the next year, becoming a prominent member of the “German republic of artists.” Six years later, he started making his way back to Germany, stopping in Venice along the way, where he remained until his death. In the early 1950s, the Kunsthalle Bremen managed to acquire 550 drawings, watercolors, and oil studies from Nerly’s estate, these works stemming largely from his early years as an artist. Nerly created Waterfall in an immediate nature study, which Rumohr had always advocated and which he regarded as a prerequisite for reforming the art of landscape painting. Spontaneously, Nerly noted in expressive marks how the water plunges into the valley in front of the dark mountain wall, becomes spray, and flows over the rocks. By leaving the foreground unfinished, Nerly lends the study the aesthetic appeal of a fragment. The monogram indicates that he regarded the work as completed, however.
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