Die Mahlzeit (Erste Fassung)

This simple, almost austere representation of the meal of a group of peasants is among Egger-Lienz's most celebrated compositions. In the most recent catalogue raisonné of the artist's work, W. Kirschl singles out two series of 'meals', equally prominent in Egger-Lienz's oeuvre: the Mittagessen, whose first version was started in 1908, and the Mahlzeit, of which the present painting is the first version. In the first series, the painter captured a group of four men and a woman, gathered around a rectangular table, eating silently from a common bowl, hidden by the massive back of one of the male figures. The light, coming in from a window at the upper left of the composition, traces strong, heavy shadows and emphasises the volumes with neat precision. The daily severity of the peasants' life is rendered through these powerful contrasts of chiaroscuro, which one can also appreciate in the present oil, where they are rendered with even subtler bravura. In the Mahlzeit series, the eye of the artist gets closer to his figures: Egger-Lienz reduces the pictorial space, foreshortens the perspective, and creates a narrow, box-like interior - the spartan setting of the meal is a metaphor for The Last Supper. In line with the Northern European iconography of the evangelical scene (clearly distinguished from Southern European tradition since the 13th Century), the protagonists of the event are sitting in circle around the table: their grave, slow gestures acquire a sacred solemnity, enhanced by the beauty of the light. Van Gogh's words on the celebrated Potato Eaters (1885, Vincent Van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam), would thus be the perfect comment for Egger-Lienz's Mahlzeit: 'I have tried to emphasise that those people, eating those potatoes in the lamp light, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food' (Vincent to Theo, Neunen, April 1885).