Details
Carl Kahler (Austrian, b.1855)
Summer
signed--oil on canvas
41½ x 68½in. (103 x 172cm.)
The works of Karl Kahler, whose artistic career began in Berlin in 1880, are rare to the market. An avid traveller, Kahler provided a sincere depiction of his time--a Europe with a wealthy leisure class--whilst quietly referring to painting of the past. By the 1880's colonialism and the rise of commerce afforded peacetime profits to a sector of the population that was able to indulge itself in festivities and fashion, all to the joyous tunes of Offenbach whose music epitomized the lighthearted nature of the time. The grip of academic insistance on the hierarchy of subject matter had loosened and painters could heed the call of Manet: Il faut être de son temps or that of Castagnary:
Ou'est-il besoin de remonter dans l'histoire, de se réfugier dans la légende, de compulser les registres de l'imagination? La beauté est sous les yeux, non dans la carvelle; dans la présent, non dans le passé; dans la verité, non dans le rêve; dans la vie, non dans la mort (Jules Castagnary, Correspondence, 1892)
Summer is a wonderful pastorale citadine (P.L. Bowles) with the park providing a civilized, organized version of nature--a beautiful playground of rowing and fishing and games. Kahler's German painting is as quintessentially French in its Sunday subject style as is so much of the 19th century. The artist has adopted the impressionist technique of painting over a white background that infuses the canvas with light. The parasol that falls into the water has a Japanese look to it, a reminder of the continuing influence of Japonisme on painting into the 1880's. The revival of interest in the 18th century that was so much a part of the 19th brings us to the couple on the park bench and the women in fancy colored dresses who hark back to figures from Watteau, and the elegant picnics in his fêtes champêtres. Even classical mythology is resurrected, with an obvious wink to an older and more erotic Leda and the Swan.
This painitng may have been exhibited in 1883 Munichen Kunstraussterlung and again in the Berlin Kunstaussterlung in 1884.
Summer
signed--oil on canvas
41½ x 68½in. (103 x 172cm.)
The works of Karl Kahler, whose artistic career began in Berlin in 1880, are rare to the market. An avid traveller, Kahler provided a sincere depiction of his time--a Europe with a wealthy leisure class--whilst quietly referring to painting of the past. By the 1880's colonialism and the rise of commerce afforded peacetime profits to a sector of the population that was able to indulge itself in festivities and fashion, all to the joyous tunes of Offenbach whose music epitomized the lighthearted nature of the time. The grip of academic insistance on the hierarchy of subject matter had loosened and painters could heed the call of Manet: Il faut être de son temps or that of Castagnary:
Ou'est-il besoin de remonter dans l'histoire, de se réfugier dans la légende, de compulser les registres de l'imagination? La beauté est sous les yeux, non dans la carvelle; dans la présent, non dans le passé; dans la verité, non dans le rêve; dans la vie, non dans la mort (Jules Castagnary, Correspondence, 1892)
Summer is a wonderful pastorale citadine (P.L. Bowles) with the park providing a civilized, organized version of nature--a beautiful playground of rowing and fishing and games. Kahler's German painting is as quintessentially French in its Sunday subject style as is so much of the 19th century. The artist has adopted the impressionist technique of painting over a white background that infuses the canvas with light. The parasol that falls into the water has a Japanese look to it, a reminder of the continuing influence of Japonisme on painting into the 1880's. The revival of interest in the 18th century that was so much a part of the 19th brings us to the couple on the park bench and the women in fancy colored dresses who hark back to figures from Watteau, and the elegant picnics in his fêtes champêtres. Even classical mythology is resurrected, with an obvious wink to an older and more erotic Leda and the Swan.
This painitng may have been exhibited in 1883 Munichen Kunstraussterlung and again in the Berlin Kunstaussterlung in 1884.