Lot 226 D

Edward Cucuel was the son of a French publisher and grew up in the US; after studying painting in Paris and spending time painting in Spain, Algeria and Asia, he lived in Munich and the surrounding countryside in the late 1910s. Along the Ammersee and Lake Starnberg, Cucuel developed a stock character of the mondaine young woman devoting herself to the sweet pursuit of doing nothing. Dressed in the latest fashions, she lolls about - alone or in the company of other young ladies - on the shores of the lakes in different seasons, swaying in boats or also balancing on jetties. Here, leaning nonchalantly before the surface of a lake depicted with a high horizon line, the picture's subject tries to avoid losing her hat in a gust of wind that also tugs at the hem of her dress and presses down on her parasol. The slightly diagonal positioning of the figure and the play of light and shadow underscore her balancing act and the motif's intrinsic dynamism. Cucuel's expansive treatment of the theme of the “dolce far niente”, of idleness, leads us to seek parallels in the literature being published in France at that time, which features figures like the passante and the flâneur - a leitmotif which certainly must have been familiar to him as the son of a French publisher and student in Paris.