Lot 1152 | Eugen Bracht | "Mitteldeutsche Landschaft"

BRACHT, EUGEN
1842 Morges - 1921 Darmstadt

Title: "Mitteldeutsche Landschaft".
View on Rochlitz Castle at the Mulde.
Date: 1918.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 99 x 119cm.
Notation: Signed and dated lower left: "Eugen Bracht 1918".
Frame: Framed.
Verso:
On the canvas inscribed and numbered by the artist's hand: 1434.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Austria.

We are grateful to Manfred Großkinsky, Karlsruhe, for confirming the attribution on the basis of a high-resolution digital photograph and his kind support.
Großkinsky refers to another version of the view from the Mulde valley, painted in 1906, that is stored in Freiberg nowadays.

Two very different works of the landscape painter Eugen Bracht are for auction under the lots numbers 1152 and 1153 that, in their own way, hint at the artist's very own characteristic style of painting and its development. With his stations in Karlsruhe, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Dresden and finally Darmstadt, Bracht shows the progression of landscape painting from the realist stance to Impressionism. For turning to this free style, Eugen Bracht is a driving motor during his Berlin years from 1882 on - although he still was closely connected to his colleagues from the Preußische Akademie and he did not join the Berliner Secession that had been founded in 1892. For freeing himself from the strict structures, however, he left the art scene of the capital after the turn of the century and took over a master studio at the Kunstakademie in Dresden. With his departure from teaching, he was drawn to the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, where he took over at the house of the painter Hans Christiansen at the artist's colony there.

While his work with the chapel at the Riviera as an oil study came into being in the course of his frequent excursions with students on-site and thereby reflects the spontaneity and vigour of plein-air painting, the Saxon landscape that was created later conveys a distinctly different impression. From bird's-eye-view the painter is looking widely into the landscape of the Mulde and portrays it and the fortified walls of Rochlitz Castle. This painting that was created in his atelier during his late years refers to an earlier work is composed accordingly and created less freely - yet, it still stands, with his Impressionist colouring, in the tradition of his earlier works.