Joseph Anton Koch (27 July 1768 - 12 January 1839) was an Austrian painter of Neoclassicism and later the German Romantic movement; he is perhaps the most significant neoclassical landscape painter.
Biography
Joseph Anton Koch (Austrian - Landscape with Abraham and the Three Angels in the Valley of Mambre
The Tyrolese painter was born in Elbigenalp. He early in his life he was tending cattle. Through the recommendation of Bishop Umgelder (1785), he received academic training in the Karlsschule Stuttgart, a strict military academy. In 1791, he ran away, and traveled through France and Switzerland. He arrived in Rome in 1795. Koch was close to the painter Asmus Jacob Carstens and carried on Carstens' "heroic" art, at first in a literal manner. He etched the pages of Carstens' Les Argonautes, selon Pindar, Orphée et Apollonius de Rhode (Rome, 1799)