International studio (16.1902)

Robert Sterl

settled in its capital, Dresden. Yet it only houses
him for about half the year—the winter season,
during which he spends a considerable time teach-
ing classes. Half his interests are centred in
Hessia, and he feels drawn to that soil as another
would to his native country. Repeated sketch-
ing tours thither with friends have made him
enamoured of those parts, and at last he built
himself a small house there, merely a studio and
a couple of rooms, at Winninghausen, two hours
from the next railroad station, three from Frankfort-
on-the-Main. To spend a season so far removed
from all comfort is a tax upon almost anyone, but
the past summer—with its splendid percentage of
fine days—well repaid him with its opportunities of
work for any inconveniences he may have had to
suffer. It was the first summer he has spent altogether
at Winninghausen, and it was a most fruitful one.
Taken altogether, his love of simplicity and his
selection as to form still hold good, but he has
learned to take more delight in colour. What his
landscape art may have lost in refined harmony it has
gained in freshness. There
are delightful sketches of
juicy green meadows,
watered by glittering
brooks against a bright
blue sky, among this last
year’s work. Confronted
so much during the height
of summer with a luxurious
bit of country, he has been
attracted more than
formerly by problems of
intense sunlight. The
labourer, for example,
seated at the brink of a
clay pit, was painted in
full midsummer sun ; the
sketch is glaring with reds
and yellows, and one of
the most powerful present-
ations of sunshine imagin-
able. This is but a
sketch, to be utilised in
some future painting.
Among the finished paint-
ings with a similar pro-
blem, there is a specially
fascinating one called the
Return from the Field. A
farmer, his wife and a child
are returning home from
their day’s work across a

meadow that lies in the shadow of a dark forest in
the middle distance. As the setting sun (not visible
itself) is behind this forest, this, too, presents
to our eye a sombre, quiet silhouette. But
beyond and below it in the perspective the last
golden rays fall upon some distant trees that are
lighted up in a blaze and form a most telling
contrast to the subdued quiet of all the fore-
ground and middle distance.
Another large painting is an excellent attempt
at a most difficult undertaking—that of painting
darkness. Farm hands are at work with some
sort of a wagon, long after sundown, when the
cloak of black night has already almost covered
the earth. I have seldom seen a picture of this
subject so excellently done. Just as we, m
nature, recognise objects when it has turned
dark only very gradually, so we do in this picture-
Unfortunately it offers insurmountable difficulties
to the photographer, but the crayon sketch here
reproduced will indicate in what direction the
virtues of the painting lie.


240