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Lot Essay
Emilie Pelikan studied in Vienna with the landscape painter Albert Zimmerman, and her early landscapes are very much in the traditional style of her teacher. After Zimmerman’s death in 1888 she went to live in the artists’ colony in Dachau - where she first met the younger Viennese painter Karl Mediz - and also spent some time in Paris, studying the work of the Impressionists. By 1890, the year of her first gallery exhibition, Pelikan was working in the coastal town of Knokke in Belgium, where she again encountered Mediz. The two artists were married in Vienna in 1891 and spent a brief period in Krems an der Donau, where their daughter Gertrude was born. Finding little success in Austria, they eventually settled in Dresden in 1894. The present sheet is dated the 2nd of April 1896, two years after the artist had settled in Dresden.
Both Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz were invited to participate in the inaugural Vienna Secession exhibition of 1898, at which they each showed three paintings. Emilie’s reputation as a gifted landscape painter and watercolourist was soon established.
Emilie Mediz-Pelikan tragically died in 1908, aged 47. Her estate and later that of Karl Mediz were deposited with the Staatliche Kunstsammmlungen Dresden. Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz’s daughter Gertrude refused to allow any exhibitions of their work to take place following their deaths and both fell into obscurity. When Gertrude died in 1975, the estates passed into the custody of the German Democratic Republic. Karl Mediz and Emilie Mediz-Pelikan’s paintings and drawings were eventually transferred to Austria, and much of the estate was acquired by the Viennese art dealer Kurt Kalb. Although a small exhibition of her work was held in Linz in 1986, it has only been in the past two decades that Mediz-Pelikan’s oeuvre has been truly rediscovered and her posthumous reputation as a gifted landscape artist and draughtsman secured. In 2019 Emilie Mediz-Pelikan was among the artists included in the revelatory exhibition City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna 1900-1938, at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, which today counts four paintings by the artist in its collection
Both Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz were invited to participate in the inaugural Vienna Secession exhibition of 1898, at which they each showed three paintings. Emilie’s reputation as a gifted landscape painter and watercolourist was soon established.
Emilie Mediz-Pelikan tragically died in 1908, aged 47. Her estate and later that of Karl Mediz were deposited with the Staatliche Kunstsammmlungen Dresden. Emilie Mediz-Pelikan and Karl Mediz’s daughter Gertrude refused to allow any exhibitions of their work to take place following their deaths and both fell into obscurity. When Gertrude died in 1975, the estates passed into the custody of the German Democratic Republic. Karl Mediz and Emilie Mediz-Pelikan’s paintings and drawings were eventually transferred to Austria, and much of the estate was acquired by the Viennese art dealer Kurt Kalb. Although a small exhibition of her work was held in Linz in 1986, it has only been in the past two decades that Mediz-Pelikan’s oeuvre has been truly rediscovered and her posthumous reputation as a gifted landscape artist and draughtsman secured. In 2019 Emilie Mediz-Pelikan was among the artists included in the revelatory exhibition City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna 1900-1938, at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, which today counts four paintings by the artist in its collection