Elise Naish, Head of Heritage and Collections at Wardown House Museum in Luton, which owns the largest collection of work by Theodor Kern, has emailed to let me know that one of the artist’s paintings will be coming up for auction in Vienna on 10th December.
The picture is one that I haven’t seen before. Signed by Kern and dated 1936, its title is simply ‘Blick auf eine Stadt’ – view of a city. However, it’s fairly clear that the city in question is Florence, and that this is yet another of the vibrant landscapes that the artist painted during his extended stay at the Hildebrand family villa of San Francesco di Paola. In fact, the viewpoint is almost exactly the same as at least four of those paintings, and I believe them to have been painted from the grounds of the villa, looking in a northeasterly direction over the rooftops of the Oltrarno district, towards the dome of the cathedral and the distant hills of Fiesole.
Although sharing the same subject and painted around the same time, these pictures are very different to each other in style. This ‘new’ painting has a sense of movement, and of capturing an evanescent moment, that is absent in some of Kern’s other Florentine landscapes, including the richly-coloured and carefully delineated view of the city, with its almost geometric cypress trees, which is one of my favourite works by the artist (see above). Closer in style and spirit to the painting currently up for auction – and almost identical in subject-matter – is this breezy, spring-like depiction:
For anyone interested in bidding for ‘Blick auf eine Stadt’, the auctioneer’s estimated price is between 1600 and 2000 euros.
Theodor Kern 