Lot number 2520 - Auction 155
STILLLEBEN MIT KIRSCHEN UND APRIKOSEN, um 1890

OTTO SCHOLDERER 1834 Frankfurt am Main - 1902, ibid. STILL LIFE WITH CHERRIES AND APRICOTS, ca. 1890 Oil on canvas. 23 × 30 cm (framed 37 × 44 cm). Monogrammed lower right "O.S." On the verso: canvas with the stamp of a London manufacturer; label of Galerie Schneider Kunsthandlung on the frame, datable to the period ca. 1914-1929. Otto Scholderer is regarded as one of the most important painters of the 19th century and as a key link between the German tradition and the new currents of the French school. Crucial for his artistic development were his stays in Paris in the late 1850s, where he formed close friendships with Henri Fantin-Latour and Édouard Manet. Fantin-Latour later immortalised him in the famous group portrait L'Atelier des Batignolles (1870), depicting Scholderer among Monet, Renoir, and Bazille. His still lifes are distinguished by exceptional refinement and by a rare culture of lightness scarcely achieved in Germany at the time. Today, Scholderer's works are represented in the most important European museums and are considered highly sought-after testimonies to the transition from Romanticism to Impressionism. The present work is an iconographic still life by Otto Scholderer from around 1890 and is exemplary of his mature Paris-London period. The composition with its dark, neutral background, marble tabletop, wine glass and fruit corresponds in every formal and iconographic respect to the stable type of still life identified by Jutta M. Bagdahn as characteristic of Scholderer's oeuvre. The objects are arranged on an almost stage-like plane and rendered with an almost portrait-like individuality; the subtle rendering of material qualities-the translucent sheen of the glass, the velvety skin of the fruit, and the cool smoothness of the marble-constitutes one of the defining features of this group of works. In composition and motif, the present painting corresponds in every detail to Still Life no. 316 (Still Life with Basket and Black Cherries, Half-Filled Wine Glass and Peaches), illustrated on p. 632 in: Jutta M. Bagdahn, Otto Franz Scholderer. Monograph and Catalogue Raisonné, 2020. Frame. Literature: Cf. Jutta M. Bagdahn, Otto Franz Scholderer. Monograph and Catalogue Raisonné, Munich 2020, cat. no. 316, p. 632. Provenance: Schneider Kunsthandlung; private collection since the 1920s.