Lot 213 Dα

This large-format painting of the vast, dune-filled landscape of North Zealand immediately envelops its viewers, whose gaze is directed from their high vantage point past a sky filled with low-hanging clouds tinted in delicate shades of pink, across a beach still in the light of the sun and out to the open sea. Although not free of melancholy, the lively alternation of light and shadow rids this evening landscape of any heaviness.
Walter Leistikow had married the Danish woman Anne Mohr in 1894. “Summer after summer, the married couple travelled through Scandinavia. For the painter, these excursions united his surrendering himself to an overwhelming nature with intense artistic work. […] Motifs from Denmark came to form a circle of themes in Leistikow's work between 1896 and 1900. He painted […] dunes and waves, but never the bustle of the summer beach. […] Leistikow did not turn his attention to Danish rural and urban life; what he wished to convey was not real nature but - as a contemporary review described - the 'noble simplification of the Nordic landscape, which for us allowed a transformation of our immediate surroundings into a fairy-tale and into unfamiliar beauty'.” (Margrit Bröhan, Walter Leistikow, Berlin 1989, pp. 47, 49).