Lot 1193 Dα

Robert Kummer learnt to paint at the Dresden Academy under Johann Christian Dahl, and was among the most important painters in Dresden in the 19th century. In the realistic depictions of landscapes that make up the majority of his oeuvre, he paid particular attention to the rendering of the sky, the clouds, and the light. In his early phase, Kummer mainly concentrated on the landscapes of Saxon Switzerland, but several sojourns to Italy, Slovenia, Scotland, Portugal, and other places extended his repertoire considerably.

This large format work depicts a landscape of the border region between Italy and Slovenia with a view of the new palace of Duino near Triest. This palace lends its name to the famous ten elegies, which the poet Rainer Maria Rilke began in 1912 whilst staying there as a guest of Countess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (née Prinzessin zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst) and completed in 1922.