Lot Essay
Prof. Dr Gert Ammann has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
Alfons Walde, an Austrian born in Kitzbühl in Tyrol, showed early artistic promise as a schoolboy experimenting with watercolour and tempera. He went on to study architecture at the Technische Hochshule from 1910 to 1914 in Vienna, where he came into contact with Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and his artistic development was heavily influenced by the work of Ferdinand Hodler. His first exhibition took place in Innsbruck in 1911 and he submitted four works to the celebrated 1913 Vienna Secession exhibition. Following an interruption to his artistic career caused by the First World War, he returned to Kitzbühl in the 1920s to develop his own characteristic style as is exemplified by Einsamer Berghof painted in 1934. A wooden chalet positioned on a rocky outcrop dominates the centre of the canvas while a Tyrolean woman with a child in her arms standing before a row of felled logs in the centre foreground gives scale to the whole composition and the horizon in the background is closed off by snowy mountain tops. The thick, impastoed surface is very typical of the artist's handling of paint in the first half of the 1930s and the modeling of snow through the passages of light and shade is masterful. Warmth radiates from this sunny snow scene through the artist's highly effective use of light. The subject of his beloved homeland, its mountains, chalets and hearty inhabitants dominated Walde's oeuvre for the remainder of his life, justly earning him the title of preeminent Tyrolean landscape artist of the Twentieth Century.
Alfons Walde, an Austrian born in Kitzbühl in Tyrol, showed early artistic promise as a schoolboy experimenting with watercolour and tempera. He went on to study architecture at the Technische Hochshule from 1910 to 1914 in Vienna, where he came into contact with Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and his artistic development was heavily influenced by the work of Ferdinand Hodler. His first exhibition took place in Innsbruck in 1911 and he submitted four works to the celebrated 1913 Vienna Secession exhibition. Following an interruption to his artistic career caused by the First World War, he returned to Kitzbühl in the 1920s to develop his own characteristic style as is exemplified by Einsamer Berghof painted in 1934. A wooden chalet positioned on a rocky outcrop dominates the centre of the canvas while a Tyrolean woman with a child in her arms standing before a row of felled logs in the centre foreground gives scale to the whole composition and the horizon in the background is closed off by snowy mountain tops. The thick, impastoed surface is very typical of the artist's handling of paint in the first half of the 1930s and the modeling of snow through the passages of light and shade is masterful. Warmth radiates from this sunny snow scene through the artist's highly effective use of light. The subject of his beloved homeland, its mountains, chalets and hearty inhabitants dominated Walde's oeuvre for the remainder of his life, justly earning him the title of preeminent Tyrolean landscape artist of the Twentieth Century.