Lot 255 Nα

According to Wilfried Kirschl, the early work “Alter Fischer am Hafen” was presumably created together with other “sea and harbour pictures” during a somewhat longer stay in Lovran, Istria, in the summer of 1901. The artist had a personal biographical bond to this place on the Adriatic Sea, south of the imperial resort of Opatija: he had become engaged there in April of 1898 and married there the next year, on 26 June 1899. His renewed summer sojourn in Lovran was situated after his move from Munich to Vienna, which also marked a major shift in his work as an artist.
In the mid-1890s the artist's style had already matured towards a greater independence and freedom in his choice of themes, motifs and their painterly realisation: beginning with Naturalism and the genre and history painting cultivated in Munich, Egger-Lienz developed his artistic individuality during those years and fashioned images distinguished by a more austere and unsentimental realism. In this process his treatment and reception of contemporary art remained very subjective: Arnold Böcklin, Jules Bastien-Lepage, Francois Millet or also Constantin Meunier were admired models, but they were not directly cited.
“Alter Fischer am Hafen” is distinctive in various respects: formally, in its composition, through the perspective and the view selected for depiction, but above all through the bold cropping of the figure, who has been shifted all the way into the foreground, to the edge of the painting. In terms of its painting, we see a broad, sometimes sketch-like application of the paint without any extensive development of details, while the contrasts and luminous accents of colour speak all the more intensely. It is telling that the likeness of the person, the portrait of the old fisherman, provides the painting with its absolute thematic substance.
An early note in an 1899 letter by the painter reveals a lot about his artistic concept and characteristic way of working. At that time he was occupied with developing his project for the monumental painting “Das Kreuz”, of 1898-1901 (Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, see Kirschl M 128), he writes:
“[...] and, to be precise, the work consists primarily in delineating the types. Only now do I wholly accept the necessity of preliminary works of this kind; because every figure is given life only when it becomes a portrait, a type, as a whole.” (Albert Egger-Lienz, cited in Wilfried Kirschl, op. cit., Vienna/Munich 1996, vol. II, p. 62). His work would prove to remain very strongly committed - in an Existential sense - to humanity and the human image.