Lot 815 | Franz Roubaud | Handing Over of the Flag to the Caliph

ROUBAUD, FRANZ
1856 Odessa - 1928 Munich

Title: Handing Over of the Flag to the Caliph.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 81 x 125cm.
Notation: Signed lower right: Roubaud.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.

Verso:
On the stretcher stamp of the Munich dealer for artist's supplies Hans Kellner as well as label of the Munich gallery Heinemann with the inv. no. 18854.

Provenance:
Art dealer Anna Dodeck, Hamburg;
Sold to Galerie Heinemann, Munich, 1930;
Sold to Galerie Hans Wolf, Bad Kissingen, 1932;
acquired there by the family of the present owners, private ownership Germany.

The painter's enthusiasm for horses, riding and the regions of the Caucasus and the Orient can be seen in almost all of Franz Roubaud's works. He was born in Odessa in 1856 as the son of French emigrants and received drawing lessons there at an early age. After a temporary stay in Paris, his final training as a painter took place in Munich, where he was a master student of the Pole Jozef Brandt. His soldier paintings also influenced Roubaud, whose themes largely revolved around Caucasian and Oriental market scenes and equestrian games. With his works, the painter celebrated success even among the Russian tsar's family, for whom he produced numerous large-format paintings and panoramas - and who in return financed many of his journeys to the Caucasus.
The large and representative canvas shown here with the multi-figured scene in front of the idealised walls of an Arabian city fits in with the painter's works from his last years in Munich. Roubaud's late work is characterised by the contrast between the very convincing and routinely executed composition on the one hand and, on the other, a very briskly painted and less precisely executed depiction of the figures and horses. Roubaud himself did not run a painter's workshop in the classical sense, with assistants or pupils to help him with the execution; he often purchased prefabricated canvases and stretcher frames from his first wife's brother, Hans Kellner, who ran a trade in frames and artists' utensils in Munich. It can therefore be assumed that the present work remained with the painter as an unfinished work in parts and was only sold by the heirs in the course of the dissolution of the studio.