Swiss Made UNLOCKED

Swiss Made UNLOCKED

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 40. ALBERT ANKER  |  KNABE BEI TISCH (RUEDI ANKER) II.

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION

ALBERT ANKER | KNABE BEI TISCH (RUEDI ANKER) II

Lot Closed

June 30, 01:38 PM GMT

Estimate

200,000 - 300,000 CHF

Lot Details

Description

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED EUROPEAN COLLECTION

ALBERT ANKER

1831 - 1910

KNABE BEI TISCH (RUEDI ANKER) II


Oil on canvas

16.3 x 21.8 cm (unframed); 29.9 x 35.7 cm (framed)

Executed 1869.


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Cécile Du Bois-Anker, Geneva

Private collection, Switzerland (1962)

Berne, Kunstmuseum, Albert Anker. Katalog der Gemälde und Ölstudien, 1962, no. 141

Sandor Kuth / Therese Bhattacharya-Stettler, Albert Anker. Werkkatalog der Gemälde und Ölstudien, 1995, Berne, p. 106, no. 137, ill.

Berne, Kunsthalle, Albert Anker, 1928, no. 239

The most celebrated Swiss genre painter of the 19th Century, Anker began his career by copying old masters at the Louvre and painting portraits of his friends and immediate family. The present work shows the artist’s eldest son Franz Adolf Rudolf, known as Ruedi, one of the painter’s six children, who tragically died, aged only two, in 1869. Another painting of the artist’s son, a moving work showing Ruedi recumbent on his deathbed with flowers, is in a Swiss private collection. The current composition is an endearing image of childhood showing the young boy seated at table intent on his meal. Anker carefully observes the child’s concentration and left hand steadying the white porcelain bowl, which seems large in comparison to the small boy. Anker also places great importance on the still life element of the composition, rendering the different textures of porcelain, silver, linen and bread with great virtuosity. Throughout his career Anker would go on to create at least 30 still lives, such as the composition Stillleben: Tee (1877, Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Winterthur) whose effect, like the present work, is largely due to the particularly subtle combination of tonalities of white.