Lot 87

Jan Preisler (1872 - 1918) BATHING

From the expert opinion of Prof. PhDr. Petr Wittlich, CSc.: "In a meadow by the forest, by the water, two nude girls on a yellow towel. A seated brown-haired girl holds a blue drapery over her head, a black girl lying on her back rests in her lap. According to the format, it is a study for the subject of Bathing, which Preisler first prepared in a pastel sketch (repro in A. Matějček, Jan Preisler, Prague 1950, no. 172 , where the reclining nude leans with her left leg against a tree) and further developed it in a larger format of 75 x 90 cm (in the catalogue of the 1964 exhibition of the National Gallery Jan Preisler under no. 112). Preisler apparently liked this composition of two nudes, because he later used it several times in other paintings from 1912-1915 (with a lake scene in the background and a gesture of the left hand of the reclining girl, study in the National Gallery Prague, definitive 105 x 105 cm in the Karlovy Vary Gallery of Art). The group was also transferred into a pastel sketch for a wall painting of the Palacký Salon of the Municipal House in Prague (Matějček, no. 192), with the reclining girl on the right. The years 1907 - 1908, when the painting was most likely created, were the years when Preisler changed his painting orientation after his encounter with Gauguin's paintings in Paris towards pure colour. This involved a change in subject matter and content from symbolist melancholy to a more joyful sense of the world, expressed by the thematic combination of the naked body and flowering nature. The works of this period are characterized by a freshness of colorful handwriting that would become academized in later major editions of Bathing."