Lot 217 D α

While at first sight the painting “Kinder am Weiher” is an Impressionist masterpiece depicting a forest and park landscape on a sunny afternoon in the early fall, aside from it being a landscape it is also a highly personal, intimate family picture, which explains why it was kept by the artist's mother and was evidently never signed. The painting was produced in Godramstein in the Rhineland Palatinate where alongside the nearby country estate Neukastell to the south-west, where the artist would reside in his later years, the family owned a villa with an attractive view of the Haardt und Vogesen mountain ranges. Slevogt's father-in-law had a tobacco and cigar factory in Godramstein.

Surrounded by vineyards the villa was set in a small park with a pond. As Hans-Jürgen Imiela mentions in his expert report, Slevogt depicts his children Nina and Wolfgang in the painting accompanied by their nanny in a white dress. The painting documented by the artist himself in his handwritten catalog raisonné and dated 1909, marks the start of his brief but fruitful phase in Godramstein, which covered the years from 1909 to 1913.
“In the oeuvre of the artist who is now 40-45 years old Godramstein undoubtedly marks a climax. Masterful in capturing the special essence of landscapes he can express to the full potential his Impressionist concept of landscape developed in these years. One can talk of a prosperous and contented period prior to World War I.” (Berthold Roland. Max Slevogt. Pfälzische Landschaften, Munich, 1991, p. 19).