L13101

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拍品 205
  • 205

Akseli Gallen-Kallela

估價
80,000 - 120,000 GBP
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招標截止

描述

  • Akseli Gallen-Kallela
  • Spring Sun at Konginkangas
  • signed with monogram and dated 1906 lower left
  • oil on canvas
  • 49 by 41cm., 19¼ by 16in.

來源

Jorma Gallen-Kallela (the artist's son)
Pirkko Gallen-Kallela (widow of the above)
Private Collection, Finland (acquired from the above in the early 1950s; sale: Hagelstam's, Helsinki, 2 December 2006, lot 121)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Condition

The canvas has not been lined. There is a small circa 0.5cm spot of paint flaking left of the centre (visible in the catalogue illustration). Ultraviolet light reveals no signs of retouching (some of the pigments, notably the whites of the snow left of the centre, fluoresce under ultraviolet light however these certainly appear to be the artist's original and not retouching). This painting is in very good original condition, with beautifully preserved impasto, and its appearance could be further enhanced if desired with a light surface clean. Held in a simple dark-painted frame, with a narrow gilt inner slip. The colours are less red overall than in the catalogue illustration, and the rocks less dark.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

拍品資料及來源

The present work was painted in the final months of winter in early 1906 at Suolahti, Konginkangas, where Gallen-Kallela had gone to paint, ski and hunt lynx.

In the 1880s Gallen-Kallela divided his time between France and Finland. Typically he spent the winter in Paris, and returned home in the summer. Coming under the influence of the leading French naturalist painter of the period in Paris, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Gallen-Kallela was drawn to the pictorial potential of Finnish rural life and its meditative landscape for his subject matter.

In his works from this period, Gallen focussed on naturalistic, figurative subjects. By the end of the decade, however, he had begun to form his own distinctive genre, painting pure landscapes devoid of human form but nonetheless pregnant with meaning, as in the present work.

These studies of different aspects of the Finnish terrain were not just quintessential records of his native land, but with the unwelcome increase in the Russification of Finland at the turn of the century, became loaded with meaning. As Janne Gallen-Kallela has explained, by way of his great-grandfather's acute observation of subtle local details and Nature's elemental forces 'the minute becomes monumental; the incidental approaches the national and the natural obtains a profound symbolic value' (quoted in Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Spirit of Finland, Groningen Museum, exh. cat., 2006, p. 118).

In the present work the prescient symbolism is expressed both through the dark shadows of the treetrunks that fall on the rocks and snow, and the stark diagonal of the fallen pine in the top left of the composition. Gallen-Kallela sets up a similar tension in another key work of the same year in the painful contortion of the central trunk in The Broken Pine (fig. 2), reflecting the nationalist spirit of the Finnish people in the face of the power of Imperialist Russia.