Old Masters & 19th Century Art

The present Lot will be on view at Freeman's Upper East Side galleries located at 32 E. 67th St in New York, May 6-11, 10am-5pm weekdays; 11am-5pm Saturday, May 9; closed Sunday, May 10.

Provenance:

Hildt Galleries, Chicago

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2007

Exhibited:

(possibly) Berlin, Academy of Royal Arts, Annual Exhibition, September 1 - October 27, 1889, p. 80, no. 416

(possibly) Vienna, Künstlerhaus, 19th Annual Exhibition, 1890, p. 19, no. 197

Literature:

(possibly) Friedrich von Boetticher, Malerwerke des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Minden, 1891-1901, vol. II, p. 3, no. 23

Lot Essay:

Born in 1856, in Berlin, Adolf von Meckel was the son of Johann Heinrich Meckel von Hemsbach, a professor of pathological anatomy and his wife, Theophile von Denffer. After his father's early death, Adolf spent his childhood with his maternal grandparents, who lived in Saint Petersburg. He later attended high school in Stuttgart, where he had his first drawing lessons, and then went on to study painting at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts with Hans Fredrik Gude (1825-1903). Gude was a romanticist painter and is considered one of Norway's foremost landscape painters, along with Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857).

Like many artists of the 19th century, von Meckel turned to Orientalism in his paintings, motivated by the search for the elsewhere, the exotic, and the different. Between 1880 and 1881, he traveled with fellow artists Eugen Bracht (1842-1921) and Carl Coven Schirm (1852-1928) to Egypt, Palestine, the coast of the Dead Sea, and Jordan. Further trips took him to the western region of North Africa, and he visited St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai, in Egypt. After his sojourns, von Meckel was first resident in Karlsruhe, then returned to Berlin in 1892.

Meckel was regularly represented at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Berlin, the Grand Berlin Art Exhibitions, and the Munich Glass Palace, as well as in Dresden, Stuttgart, and Vienna. The present work, Evening on the Nile, was likely exhibited in both the Berlin Academy of Royal Arts’ 1889 Annual Exhibition and at the Künstlerhaus 19th Annual Exhibition in Vienna, in 1890. Although there is no photographic evidence to concretely confirm that the work is the same as listed in the Berlin and Viennese exhibitions, the date of the painting, 1888, its first appearance at an exhibition in 1889, and its large size, make for a compelling case.

The painting depicts an idyllic, calm moment at the day’s close, as a group of women bathe in an estuary of the Nile, a crescent moon and Venus overhead. Warm oranges, pinks, and violets from the sunset wash the scene with a sense of tranquility. Against the horizon, a small village and groups of palm trees cluster to the right, barely seen behind the tall grasses that shield the women’s privacy. The subject matter, while “exotic,” reveals von Meckel’s keen ability to show life realistically in lands far from his European audience.