Lot 1281 | Otto Grashof | Two Portraits

GRASHOF, OTTO
1812 Prenzlau - 1876 Cologne

Title: Two Portraits:
Date: each 1854.
a.) Portrait of a Woman with her Four Children. Watercolour over pencil, heightened with white on paper. Mounted. 38 x 50,5 cm. Signed and dated on the right: Otto Grashof 1854 / Valparaiso July. Framed.
b.) Portrait of the Governor of Catamarca. Oil on canvas. 80 x 68 cm. Signed and dated lower right: Otto Grashof / Valparaiso / 1854. Framed.
a.) Literature:
R. Löschner: Otto Grashof. Die Reisen des Malers in Argentinien, Uruguay, Chile und Brasilien 1852-1857, Berlin 1987, ill. p. 269, no. 24.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

Both works were created in 1854 in Valparaiso on the Pacific coast of Chile, where Grashof travelled from Argentina and Uruguay. Two years earlier he had arrived in South America, creating city views and commissioned portraits of wealthy citizens. On his travels, which are very well documented by a lively correspondence with his brothers in Germany, he drew a large number of small studies, as he had done before in Russia. On the basis of the letters and drawings, it is also possible to identify the gentleman portrayed; although described on the reverse as "Goubernado de Valparaiso", it is Pedro José Segura who, as governor of the Argentine province of Catamarca, commissioned a portrait from the travelling Grashof in 1853. The painter made a sketch on the spot and delivered the oil painting from Valparaiso the following year.