*RARE* 1920s "Playing in the Waves" Triton Framed Print by Arnold Bocklin 1883

Description: Arnold Bocklin1827-1901Swiss Symbolist painterIm Spiel der Wellen"In the Play of the Waves"1883"Like the Pan theme, that of the Tritons or Sea Centaurs is a pictorial subject frequently used by Böcklin. These sea creatures personify male Eros in a similar way. As is so often the case with his pictorial inventions, the immediate inspiration for the picture seems to have come from a personal experience. During a swimming trip on the island of Ischia together with the family of his deep-sea researcher friend Anton Dohrn, the scholar frightened the ladies by swimming for a long time and suddenly appearing in close proximity, thereby stimulating Böcklin's imagination to transfer the impression to the realm of the sea demons. The viewer's involvement in the ups and downs of the waves, the boundlessness of the sea without any hint of land, the blissful unbound freedom above all of the Triton in which Dohrn is portrayed, plus the psychological behavior of the individual naiads in gestures and facial expressions, make this painting one of Böcklin's most cheerful pictorial poems. His vivid imagination was unbroken and was able to bring never-before-seen mythical creatures to life before our eyes in an almost embarrassingly tangible reality. "Source:URL: https://www.sammlung.pinakothek.de/de/artwork/apG9V2m4Zn (Last updated on 18.07.2023): This print is in its original wood frame in black and copper/gold gold leaf trim. It is a beautiful, whimsical print by Arnold Bocklin made after his original oil on canvas of 1883. Below is more historical context and understanding for this lovely print. The print is in black and white, the original painting is shown in color for reference purposes only. "In 1899, when the craze for Arnold Böcklin’s work was in full swing, the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt (the brother of Böcklin’s Berlin dealer Fritz Gurlitt) wrote that the German public regarded this painting as “one of the greatest achievements of our century.” When it was painted in 1883, art critics had been less sure. Enthusiasm for the painting had grown, however, by the time of its showing at the Third Munich International in 1888. Offering his interpretation of the work, Ferdinand Avenarius of Der Kunstwart declared that the worried mermaid being pursued by the laughing triton personified the ocean itself and the natural forces of water and sky. Actually, a rather ordinary episode in the artist’s life appears to have provided the immediate inspiration for this composition. Böcklin had been swimming in Italy with the family of Anton Dohrn, the zoologist who commissioned Hans von Marées’s Oarsmen. Dohrn dove into the waves, swam some distance underwater, and suddenly resurfaced near the women in the bathing party. The ladies’ surprise caught Böcklin’s fancy, and he decided to portray a similar scene drawn from the world of mythical underwater creatures. His composition thrusts the viewer into the rising and falling waves, which are shown without the slightest hint of land in the distance. Dohrn’s features can actually be seen in the face of the triton, whose freely expressed and ribald intentions make this the most playful of Böcklin’s works. In the early years of the twentieth-century, when overzealous members of the moral purity movement were subject to ridicule and denouncement, In the Play of the Waves offered ample basis for caricature—moral zealots, complete with fig leaves, were shown swimming into the frame of the painting in order to arrest the mermaids" Source : website Germanhistorydocs.org.

Price: 95 USD

Location: McLean, Virginia

End Time: 2024-08-25T12:52:16.000Z

Shipping Cost: 15 USD