Beschreibung:

WINDY DAY
Description dimensions: 68 x 82,5 cm (h x w) period: 1907 Oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard. Signed lower right: "F. ENGELMÜLLER 1967". From the assessment by PhDr. Nadezda Blazicková-Horová, “Windy Day is an unquestionable and excellent work by Ferdinand Engelmüller, who studied under Julius Marák at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. After he completed his studies he was a founder of the Manes in 1896, but after two years he left the association and entered the Union of Fine Artists. In 1897 he opened a highly successful painting school on the Vltava river embankment in central Prague, which went on to become the official preparatory school for Academy students. In 1916 he moved into the former apartment of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk in Hrzán Palace on Loretanska Street, where he expanded his painting school and turned his studio with a terrace overlooking Prague into a centre of Prague art society. He travelled extensively and in Bohemia he particularly enjoyed painting the Elbe River Valley and the area around Trebon. At the start of his career he was influenced by Chittussi, painted with Antonin Slavicek, and in the mid-1890s was captivated by decadent poetry. Frequent subjects in his paintings are snowy atmospheric landscape, melancholic views of old parks, especially in the autumn evening light, and overgrown, abandoned monastery gardens. He also painted landscapes affected by various types of weather, as seen in Windy Day. The impressive landscape perspective and cultivated colour depicts the mood of a windy summer day, the wind bending trees and reeds along the shore and pushing the white clouds filling the sky into the foreground, captured in a masterfully painted work. Windy Day is an excellent painting by the artist.”