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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Oct 28, 2025 | Hindman Auctions | New York | Impressionist and Modern Art | 16 | $****** - ****** | Fischer auf dem Gardersee bei Mondlicht (Fishermen on the Gardnosee by Moonlight) |
Works on Paper
49.2 x 61.9 cm (19.38 x 24.38 in)
watercolor and gouache on paper
signed HMPechstein and dated (lower left)
We wish to thank Mrs. Julia Pechstein, Hamburg, for kindly confirming the authenticity of the present lot, which will be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity dated September 3, 2025.
Lot Essay:strong
A prolific painter and printmaker, Max Pechstein is perhaps best known as a German Expressionist painter of the Die Brücke group in the years before World War I. Along with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, they helped define a particular emotionally charged style of painting that looked to the French Fauves and primitivist art, using strong, vibrant color and angularity of lines and shapes. Pechstein spent most of the year 1908 in Paris where he experienced the work of the Fauves firsthand, including Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin, later that year moving to Berlin and seeing Matisse"s paintings again at Paul Cassirer Gallery.
In 1914, the artist and his wife, in search of inspiration from more primitive art forms, traveled to Palau, an island in the western Pacific Ocean, where they were captured and imprisoned in Japan at the start of the First World War. They were later sent back to Germany and Pechstein fought in the war, becoming a more radical Socialist politically as the war drew to a close. After his service, Pechstein returned to Berlin and held a professorship teaching art at the Berlin Academy, experiencing a burst of creative energy and revisiting his Expressionist style of painting.
In the years following his war service, the artist grappled with depression, especially during the long, cold German winters, and he sought refuge at a vacation home in the fishing village and artist colony of Nidden (Nida, Lithuania) on the Baltic Sea coast. In 1921, when Nidden ceased to belong to Germany under the Treaty of Versailles, the artist set about searching for a new enclave. Setting off alone in the spring of 1921, he travelled on foot along the coast until he discovered Leba (Pomerania, now Poland), a seaside resort town located on the Baltic coast near the Łebsko Lake. The artist was struck by the natural beauty of the village, where he settled and immediately found renewed artistic inspiration: \
Max Pechstein
(German, 1881-1955)
Fischer auf dem Gardersee bei Mondlicht (Fishermen on the Gardnosee by Moonlight), 1931
watercolor and gouache on paper
signed HMPechstein and dated (lower left)
19 3/8 x 24 3/8 in. (49.2 x 61.9cm)
Property from a Private East Coast Collection
This lot is located in Philadelphia.
