Lot 31 Dα

“Weg im Weimarer Park” is entirely dedicated to light and its effect on the objective world. The formal structure of the landscape dissolves in the intense and dominating brightness of a sunny spring day. The path and the fields of grass as well as the delicate foliage of the trees and the sky merge into a shimmering unity made up of yellowish tints of white, a silvery grey-blue and a golden yellow. The limitation of the painter's palette to these almost metallic tones is supplemented by a few red and reddish-brown accents which form the cracked textures of the tree trunks and branches and bring out details in the three strolling figures. The group of trees and the people thus form the only clearly delineated elements of the composition and clarify the representational context in the midst of the glaring abundance of light to which viewers find themselves exposed.
From 1883, Rohlfs concentrated on landscape motifs painted in the open air. He was very much fascinated by impressions of nature, such as reflections and reflected light, but also the depiction of materiality, and the disordered, intention-free aspect of nature was decisive for him in this context. Although he knew the work of the French Impressionists first hand from at least 1890 - the year when our work was created and when a number of works by Claude Monet were exhibited in Weimar - he did not adopt their way of painting. Instead, he worked with the same impasto application of paint - sometimes using a palette knife - that his teacher Alexandre Struys had practised and which was still referred to by contemporary art critics as “crude”. “Precisely this [the colour] proved especially suited for the representation of materiality sought by Rohlfs,” writes Paul Vogt. “Here it was a matter of differentiating the tonal values, a scale of neutralised tones of colour, and Rohlfs was soon an expert master of this, as critics in turn reassured him. The felicitous balance is what is charming about the pictures of this period.” (Paul Vogt, Christian Rohlfs. Oeuvre-Katalog der Gemälde, Recklinghausen 1978, p. 11).