Lot 150 D

Bernhard Kretzschmar captured the entire range of life in his home town of Dresden – from monumental cityscapes featuring its Baroque city centre to scenes from its bourgeois cafes to its impoverished suburban housing estates.
The image of Ms Dittmayer is one of Kretzschmar’s few portraits of sitters who were not members of his family. Stephanie Dittmayer (née Hammer) was the wife of Dresden businessman Hans Dittmayer. The couple began collecting works by expressionist artists in the 1920s and, over the years, they built up a significant collection featuring Otto Dix, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and Lyonel Feininger, for example. In this painting from 1928 Kretzschmar has depicted her as an elegant and attentively reserved woman with a critical gaze. Dressed up to go out, with a hat, fur-lined jacket and gloves, she seems to have spent only a moment in the painter’s studio; an oblique ray of light picturesquely illuminates part of her remarkable face and sets a pearl earring shimmering.
Due to Stephanie Dittmayer’s Jewish faith, her husband and three sons also increasingly became victims of persecution during the 1930s, and Hans Dittmayer evacuated his art collection to Prague, among other places, in 1944. The location of several of these works still remains unknown today.