Lot 6 Dα

This striking interior is an early oil painting by Lovis Corinth, one of the most versatile German painters from the turn of the century. He studied at Munich’s academy of fine arts from 1880 to 1884 and then switched to the Académie Julian in Paris. Corinth lived there from 1884 to 1887 – interrupted by summers spent in Munich, the Black Forest or Panker in Holstein.
The painting “Im Fischerhaus” was created in Ellerbek bei Kiel in 1886, during a Baltic journey with Hans Olde, a painter based in Holstein. The interior provides a glimpse inside an Ellerbek fisherman’s house, whose hall is washed in warm reddish-brown tones. A young woman with a blue dress and her hair up has laid fishing nets across a wooden pole in order to impregnate them with the hot oil in the trough placed in front of her on a wooden bench painted dark green. At the same time, the ends of the massive wooden pole are being held by two girls. The main figure is depicted smiling and seems distracted by her conversation with the young fisherman opposite her, whose face is obscured by the shadow of his sou’wester. Smoking a pipe, he observes the process from a distance. The scene’s muted palette recalls interiors from Dutch and Flemish painting. However, the painter has learned his treatment of light and how to place highlights on the hair, faces and fabrics from the French: natural daylight, which enters through the window and a narrow crack in the door, models the nuanced sequence of browns, beiges and blues, causing the two-dimensional forms to glow. Although the East Prussian artist was denied an award at the “Salon des Beaux Arts” in Paris in 1885, he succeeded in at least placing at the salon of 1887 after submitting an initial oil study from 1886 (Berend-Corinth 41) dealing with the motif of “Im Fischerhaus”.