Forellenweiher

Wonderful black and white etching and drypoint on wide rod cream paper.  Hand signed in graphite on the lower right: " Franz v Stuck" (lightly discolored) and signed on plate on the lower left in capital letters. Inscribed on plate below the image: "FORELLENWEIHER" in capital letters. Printed on Van Gelder Zonen paper (watermark on the higher margin) and heraldic symbol watermark on the lower margin at the center. Fresh impression with a vibrant black, wide margin, excellent conditions except for some minor foxing beyond the margins.

While he typically favored mythological and allegorical subjects, Stuck began making landscape paintings when he visited the artist colony of Osternberg in the early 1890s. He made this dense, dark etching after a painting of the same title. The stillness of the twilit scene is interrupted by only the concentric ripples on the glistening surface of the water, barely upsetting the reflection of the row of trees along the edge of the pond. The print was later published in the Munich-based art journal Jugend, the namesake of the German iteration of Art Nouveau. A copy of this etching is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. 

Franz von Stuck (1863; Tettenweis, Germany-1928; Munich, Germany) German artist of exceptional skills as a painter, was also sculptor, engraver, photographer, and draughtsman. Considered “ the last of the great draughtsmen before the dissolution of form imposed by the avant-garde movements of the 20th century ”, he was a member-founder of the Munich Secession in 1893, and together with other artists he was a forerunner of the Art Nouveau experience, called Jugendstil in Germany. Thanks to his style of formal perfection, sensuality and decadent sensitivity , he seduced the art world of half Europe. Von Stuck was particularly successful in Italy, to such an extent that he was granted a solo show at the Venice Biennial of 1909.His figurative repertory derived from classical art – centaurs, fauns, nymphs drawn from antique mythology in the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Arnold Böcklin – and was mediated through a fin-de-siècle sensibility towards eroticism and artfulness.