Funded by:
Fields with blossoming trees, 1904, Trützschlerstr.
This small painting, which is approximately A4 in size, dates from 1904. The motif of fruit trees blossoming in spring appears several times in Schmidt-Rottluff's early works, as he spent his childhood and youth in the countryside far from the city of Chemnitz. In Rottluff and Rabenstein, farm gardens and orchards were part of the village ambience and the talented young man encountered them daily on his way to school, on his
forays into nature or during other activities.
In the foreground of the painting, however, a brown area of freshly ploughed earth laid out in horizontal stripes blocks the view rather than leading the eye into the picture. The flowering trees that give the painting its title stand in the middle ground of the landscape and are at the same time pushed into the upper third of the picture. It is striking that Schmidt-Rottluff frequently arranged the trees diagonally and from left to right in the direction of reading during these years. He presumably followed the actual arrangement of the trees here. In the opinion of Beate Ritter, former
curator of the Chemnitz Art Collections, many of the creative devices in this small oil sketch testify more to the later artist's searching than to his having found an adequate solution for an intended composition.
Year 1904
Oil on canvas 20.2 x 31.3 cm
(Source: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, inventory catalog 2015)
www.kunstsammlungen-chemnitz.de
A map view from Google Maps can be loaded or hidden here with a click.
By loading the map view from Google Maps, personal data may be transferred to Google. For more information, see our Privacy Policy.