Wilhelm Bader 1855-1920
Symbolist Landscape
Oil on a stretchered oak panel
Signed and dated 1896
Panel size: 62 x 50 cms
THE ARTIST
The artist was a painter and engraver. He was born in Darmstadt in 1855.
After studying at the Berlin Academy, he ventured on a grand voyage into the mountains of the Tyrol. He later settled in Munich and worked in the Munich Academy where he had the benefit of being taught by accomplished artists of the day; Dietz, Lofftz, Seitz and A. Muller. Bader later became the Director at the Darmstadt School of Art.
He is known for a monumental and mysterious quality in his landscapes, and allegorical and mythological compositions, which in addition to being paintings, were published as fine art engravings, including Sisyphe and the Danaiids, Innocence and Love, 1881, Under the charm of the Music, 1883. Other works gained mention in the critical reviews of the day, including Ruins at the Edge of the Sea, Source dans le Bois and other paintings..
THE PAINTING
This work is inspired by the over-awing power of the Tyrolean mountainscape, but Bader has created an image of emotive intensity by the use of intense and finely packed variances of colour, contrasts of light and juxtaposing textural opposites. He has created a mystical quality about it that begs questions as to what the figure is doing and where he is going, and what the significance of the monumental natural archway is.
Bader has represented a fleeting soul, perhaps himself, who passes by this place in seconds, with cloud moving in and out of the frame in minutes, at a time of day where the sun is going down, over an hour or two, as part of a 24 hour cycle, on a windy early autumn day within the seasons of the cycle of the year, while a rock that is there for an aeon of time has beneath it, the moments time of the passing of a man. Bader is presenting us with the cycle of cycles of nature.
It is an expression of time and our place in it; we are forced to consider our own significance, perhaps transitory and fleeting, but as a part of the landscape we can glean a sense of the timeless and everlasting, and thus enlarge ourselves. The subject is one of poetry and metaphysics, and Bader has expressed this abstract notion in near abstract form, in paint.
