拍品專文
Caught in a constant battle with ill health and poverty, Emil Jakob Schindler was, nonetheless, always delighted in the beauty of nature and adopted it as the main subject of his artistic life. Known as the artist of the Mühlenromantik (Mill Romantic), lightheartedly referring to his love of water and particularly of watermills, the present work, Das Schwefelbacherl bei Goisern, exemplifies his stylistic concerns.
The sunlight shines through the silvery leaves of a forest, onto the figure of a young child, standing naked at the edge of a stream, contemplating its reflection. Here man is at one with nature, the innocence of the child comparable to the purity of the stream. However, like the clothes at the feet of the child, the barrier in the background, controlling the flow of the stream, reminds us of the intrusion man has inevitably imposed upon his surroundings.
In 1885, Schindler was recovering from illness, no doubt compounded by the worries his lack of money brought upon him and his family. The countryside provided a welcome break from the turbulence of Vienna, and his love of Goisern, in the Salzkammergut in Austria, where he spent the summers of 1882 to 1885, is made clear in a note he wrote on the landscape of that area: 'Let us begin with the mill, the singing house of the highest order. This is the right place for mental rendezvous, where man and artist have to come together. The whole understanding of the viewer, otherwise so sadly absent, here it is assured; for even the me-person, so tortured by worry, who can wander the flowering garden 'Earth' as if without eyes, in front of this house he halts. Nobody is so impoverished in the heart, that this half Godly, half human creation, tireless and never-ending giver of welfare, the river swallow, the forget-me-not of the human creations, could leave them indifferent ...' (Fuchs, op. cit., p. 25).
The sunlight shines through the silvery leaves of a forest, onto the figure of a young child, standing naked at the edge of a stream, contemplating its reflection. Here man is at one with nature, the innocence of the child comparable to the purity of the stream. However, like the clothes at the feet of the child, the barrier in the background, controlling the flow of the stream, reminds us of the intrusion man has inevitably imposed upon his surroundings.
In 1885, Schindler was recovering from illness, no doubt compounded by the worries his lack of money brought upon him and his family. The countryside provided a welcome break from the turbulence of Vienna, and his love of Goisern, in the Salzkammergut in Austria, where he spent the summers of 1882 to 1885, is made clear in a note he wrote on the landscape of that area: 'Let us begin with the mill, the singing house of the highest order. This is the right place for mental rendezvous, where man and artist have to come together. The whole understanding of the viewer, otherwise so sadly absent, here it is assured; for even the me-person, so tortured by worry, who can wander the flowering garden 'Earth' as if without eyes, in front of this house he halts. Nobody is so impoverished in the heart, that this half Godly, half human creation, tireless and never-ending giver of welfare, the river swallow, the forget-me-not of the human creations, could leave them indifferent ...' (Fuchs, op. cit., p. 25).