LOHR, AUGUST1843 Munich - ca. 1919 Berlin


Title: Mountain Landscape in Mexico with Popocatepetl.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 60 x 105cm.
Notation: Signed and dated lower left: "August Lohr 1915".
Frame: Framed.
Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

Among the great painters of American landscapes, our gaze today falls primarily on the representatives of the Hudson River School. These painters, many of whom completed their training at the Düsseldorf Academy and then returned to their homeland to portray spectacular nature, first worked in a realistic manner, later also turning towards Impressionism. They often found their motifs in the mountains of North America.

The painter August Lohr, who was born near Salzburg and trained in Munich, specialised in Mexican motifs. He was particularly fascinated by the volcanoes of the Mexican highlands. Often the snow-covered peak of Popocatepetl shines in the background and the painter is able to heighten the atmosphere even more by having the landscape below still dark in the twilight while the peak is already shining in the sun.

Even though August Lohr is sought after precisely for these Mexican landscapes, he came to Central America relatively late. First he travelled several times in the United States and specialised there in very large-format panoramas. Together with the history painter and Munich professor Louis Braun, he first created panoramas on historical themes of the Franco-Prussian War, before commissioning these formats in New Orleans in 1884 and taking over the American Panorama Company. The staggered structure of the landscape with the enormous effect of the pictorial depth also determines the view from 1915 shown here: the diagonally running wall in the foreground, the staggered depth with church, forest, mountain range and the volcano rising above it show the sure handwriting of a painter practised in large panoramas.