Details

Provenance:

Gustav Ferdinand Jung Collection, Hagen (1878-1943);

Hildegard Jung, by inheritance from the aforementioned in 1976, sister of the sculptor Hans Walther in Erfurt;

Divided among the children by inheritance;

Sotheby’s, special auction G.F. Jung Collection, London 2 December 1981, lot 122;

Private collection, London;

Karl & Faber, 9 December 2011, lot 501;

Private collection, Austria.

Descrizione

Christian Rohlfs was inspired to this charming chalk drawing by the works of the French Impressionists Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, which were first exhibited in Weimar in 1890. Through this influence, he found his own new means of painterly expression and around 1900 was already considered one of the leading representatives of German plein-air painting. The depiction of the “Belvedere Avenue in Weimar” is still dominated by a dark-toned palette, but the strong colour accents and nuances with bright yellow and orange as well as an intense blue show Rohlf’s new artistic imprint. The technique of coloured chalk gives him the opportunity to work quickly and spontaneously outdoors and thus capture his impressions of nature directly. This work can be categorised in the extensive œuvre group of tree-lined streets, in which the Belvedere Avenue, which leads from Weimar in a dead straight line southwards to Belvedere Palace, occupies a special place. Over several years, from C. 1889 to 1905, Rohlfs varied this motif with the changing seasons and his artistic developments as well as the influences of Impressionism and Pointillism can be wonderfully traced.

The “Belvedere Avenue in Weimar” comes from the collection of the Hagen merchant and manufacturer Gustav Ferdinand Jung. By 1924, he had bought contemporary works of art by E. L. Kirchner, E. Heckel, L. Feininger, H. Campendonk and Christian Rohlfs. Jung became close friends with Rohlfs, who had also lived in Hagen since 1901. After his death in 1943, Jung’s widow Hildegard preserved the art collection, which was only divided up and sold by inheritance among the children after her death in 1976.