Lot 55 Dα

Lesser Ury, who was an introverted man by nature and accordingly never joined any of the well-known artists’ groups, sought secluded places and the tranquillity of nature for his landscape paintings: “As a fine-art painter I intend,” he wrote to his friend Hans Olde in 1892, “to make studies in a village or some little nest for maybe 3 months, […] where one can work without disruption. The poorer the village, the better” (cited in: Hermann A. Schlögl, Lesser Ury. Ein Lebensbericht nach Dokumenten und Briefen, in: Lesser Ury, exh. cat. Berlin 1995, p. 26). In keeping with this, he regularly stayed along the lakes and rivers of the countryside around Berlin from the early 1890s, and this is also where he created the “Havellandschaft bei Sonnenuntergang” offered here. This work depicts the Havel river calmly flowing along as well as individual trees of the pine forest: in the light of the setting sun, their silhouettes stand out against the sky in the manner of a theatrical backdrop. Influenced by the black-and-white idiom of graphic art and inspired by contemporary photography, Ury worked exclusively with black oil paint, an opaque white and a broad range of grey tones to produce “Havellandschaft”, one of his rare landscape grisailles. Even without the use of colour, he has created a strikingly atmospheric landscape. Whether or not Ury initially had a concrete natural image before his eyes, this is no mere reproduction; instead, it gives expression to his experience and his understanding of the world by providing the silence of nature with a voice.