Eugen von Blaas

Von Blaas strove to capture the inherent beauty of Italian women by capturing them in their daily lives, in conversation, in the streets, selling flowers, or courting lovers. A young woman is portrayed here leaning against the balustrade of a Venetian home and holding a rose, whose color and delicacy is reflected in her features.

The artist’s technical abilities are evident in his rendering of the sumptuous fabrics and lace in the woman’s corset and in the delicate still life. As the artist's biographer Thomas Wassibauer points out, to some degree his compositions are fantasies, figures frozen in time which explore and experience what he calls ‘harmless joie de vivre’.