GEORGES TRAUTMANN (Zweibrücken, 1713 - Frankfurt, 1769) Fights between commoners Oil on panel, 22.5X19 cm (2) Provenance: Milan, Caiati Gallery (1989) Milan, private collection Exhibitions: Milan, Milan Antiques Fair, 1989 Johann Georg Trautmann was one of Rembrandt's most important pupils, a generational peer of Christian Wilhelm Ernst Dietrich (1712-1774), with whom he had a number of traits in common. Trautmann was livelier and more imaginative than Dietrich, but both venerated the young Rembrandt and the artists who sought to imitate his fanciful elegance and lighting effects, such as Leonard Bramer and Adriaen van de Venne. Trautmann even achieved a certain literary celebrity, as Goethe referred to him as an artist 'who had adopted Rembrandt as his model and had achieved such great perfection in lights and closed reflections, as well as in effective fires, that he was once ordered to paint a companion piece to a Rembrandt' (From my Life: Poetry and Truth, 1811). Or elsewhere: 'Trautmann rembranded some miracles of resurrection from the New Testament and, alongside them, set villages and mills on fire'.