Funded by:
House at August noon, 1905, Gerstenbergerstr. stop.
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, on loan from private collection
The painting shows a large house bathed in sunlight, its façade and roof glowing in red and yellow. The contrast is provided by the vegetation, with the conifer on the right in the foreground, painted in a complementary dark blue-green, adding depth to the picture. The painting was created in the first summer of the group of artists founded on June 7, 1905; the motif is therefore one of the very first Brücke paintings by Schmidt-Rottluff to be painted in oil and one of the few from 1905, as woodcuts were in the foreground that year.
The picture shows the large, two-storey tenement house with outbuilding on a neighbouring plot of land to his parents' mill, the first in the Rabenstein area - now Limbacher Straße 388. Despite its ruinous state today, the shape of the building can still be guessed at and recognized in Schmidt-Rottluff's work. He had already captured the same house around 1902 in a watercolor that is unfortunately lost today.
He confidently signed the painting from August with his new, still abbreviated artist's name "Schmidt-Rottl.", one of the earliest known signatures of this kind. Schmidt-Rottluff's self-confidence and trust in his artistic abilities and future life as an artist must already have been so convincing that he wanted to distinguish himself from all other artists with the same name and added the name of his birthplace to his own. This was a common practice, but it also testifies to Schmidt-Rottluff's close ties to his home town.
Year 1905
Oil on cardboard, 35 x 51 cm
(Source: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, inventory catalog 2015)
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