Burlaks pulling two ships upstream (on the Inn)

Details

Nicht bei Bühler/Krückl.

Provenienz:
Sotheby’s, München, Auktion, 25.6.1996, Los 77;
Privatsammlung, Süddeutschland.

Description

“(…) There, the banks of the Inn with its old defence towers were the station of the treidlers who had come down the Inn and the Salzach to continue their journey to Linz, Vienna and Budapest after a short rest. Laufen on the Salzach and Hall am Inn in Tyrol were departure points. Originally, the ships brought salt and carried horses down with them, destined to bring up Hungarian wheat and maize as a counter-load. He (Bürkel) may have seen and painted the train of ships for the first time in the narrows east of Passau. It was a welcome spectacle for him, a friend of horses, to see the steaming bodies of the Pinzgauers and their successors bred on the Samerberg south of Rosenheim. But then he was drawn up the Inn, to where herdsmen and horses were at home. So he came to Beuern, to Rattenberg. And here he collected study material that saved a wealth of folk life and customs from oblivion, which disappeared at a stroke with the construction of the railway lines. (…). Treidelei was one of the main themes of the 1920s, and the Treidler paintings certainly contributed significantly to the painter’s surprisingly rapid success” (Ludwig von Bürkel, Heinrich Bürkel. Ein Malerleben der Biedermeierzeit, Munich 1940, p. 25f.).
We are grateful to Alfred Krückl, Munich, for confirming the authenticity of the present work on the basis of a high resolution digital image.