The Four Elements, Study for a Painted Ceiling, c.1750–1752

The print

Printed by theprintspace, the East London fine-art lab trusted by artists, galleries and museums. Each print is made to order on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, a heavyweight 308gsm paper made from 100% cotton, with a soft matte surface and a natural white tone, using archival pigment inks made to last for generations.

A note on the surface: the fine web of craquelure across the original canvas, built up over 270 years, is reproduced faithfully, along with every quick stroke of Maulbertsch’s sketch. Photo Rag’s smooth cotton adds no texture of its own, so what you see is the painting itself.

Sizes available:

59×42cm, 23×17″, fine art print, open edition
84×59cm, 33×23″, fine art print, open edition
100×70cm, 39×28″, fine art print, open edition

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The story

Franz Anton Maulbertsch was born in 1724 in Langenargen, on Lake Constance, trained in Vienna and died there in 1796. He became one of the great ceiling painters of Central Europe, and is credited with developing the Northern tradition of the oil sketch: small, fast paintings in which a whole composition was worked out before being scaled up across a vault.

This sketch, from around 1750–1752, is a ceiling design built around the four elements. Its full subject is still uncertain: the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, which acquired it in 1920, calls it a possible Allegory of Time, with a question mark. Maulbertsch’s loose, Venetian-flavoured handling is often compared with Tiepolo, who was finishing his own vast ceiling at Würzburg in the same years.