Property from a Private Collection

WILLY EISENSCHITZ (AUSTRIAN 1889-1974)
Canal St Martin, Paris
signed Eisenschitz (lower right); signed, titled and dated Willy Eisenchitz Canal St Martin avec l'Hopital St Louis 1956 (on the artist's label attached to the reverse)
oil on canvas
73 x 60 cm (28 3/4 x 23 5/8 in)

PROVENANCE:
Acquired by the present owner circa 2000

The authenticity of this lot has been confirmed by Prof. Joseph Schütz, author of Willy Eisenschitz: Werkverzeichnis 1889-1974.

Willy Eisenschitz was born into a wealthy Viennese bourgeois family. After attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, he moved to Paris in 1912 to study at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière. Whilst studying he met his future wife the French Expressionist artist Claire Bertrand and they went on to regularly exhibit with together. Throughout his life he was fascinated by Gauguin and Cezanne, and their influence can be seen in his colourful landscapes executed in Provence and Ibiza.

Many of Eisenschitz's views of Paris show the city's poor, industrial areas, his own neighbourhood around the Rue de Tournon and the monuments at the Saint-Sulpice. The present work comes from a melancholic series of the Canal St Martin made by the artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A comparable work from this series can be found at The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Eisenschitz's work is based on harmony and proportion. In the present lot he carefully balances the soft pastel yellows of the outer buildings with the deep central red. He has skillfully created an atmospheric stormy sky with varying tones of layered deep blue pigments which is reflected in the canal below. Two of the matchstick figures are painted in a bright and intense non-naturalistic orange, a reference to the artist's earlier and more colourful works.

During his lifetime Eisenschitz exhibited and participated in notable exhibitions and galleries including the Salon des Indépendants (1922), Salon des Tuileries (1926), Salon d'Autmone (1928), Musée d’Art de Toulon (1957), Durand-Ruel and in the 1930s he was awarded the gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris.