EDWARD CUCUEL
San Francisco 1875 - 1954 Pasadena
Ref: CC 238
The picnic
Signed lower left and on the reverse: Cucuel.
Inscribed on the stretcher: Picnic im Schatten
Oil on canvas: 25 ½ x 31 ½ in / 64.8 x 80 cm
Frame size: 36 x 42 in / 91.4 x 106.7 cm
Painted circa 1915
Provenance:
Private collection, France, then by descent c.1930
Although born in America, Edward Cucuel spent much of his career working in Germany, moving to Berlin in 1899, where he met his wife the artist, Clara Lotte von Marcard. Installed in Munich in 1907, during the First World War, Cucuel stayed in Holzhausen on the banks of Lake Ammer, which may be the location of the shaded picnic or the shores Lake Starnberg in Bavaria, where he and his family had a summer house from 1918. The property, which had a large overgrown garden, fronted the lake with its own private jetty, on which the artist often had his models pose. The garden and the lake beyond provided the backdrop to Cucuel’s carefree summer scenes of beautiful, fashionably dressed young women boating, bathing and picnicking en plein air. Cucuel was greatly inspired by the Impressionists, in particular the Tyrolian artist Leo Putz (1869-1940), with whom he spent summers from 1909 painting at Putz’s Hartmannsdorf Castle.
This picturesque composition combines all the stylish characteristics of this rare American post-impressionist painter; two elegant women dressed in black and white, the delicacy of spring, the dappled sunshine and light on the water creating an idyllic vision of sweet idleness. A comparable work of the same title is illustrated in Fritz von Ostini, Der Maler Edward Cucuel, Amalthea Verlag, Zurich, 1924 (plate 70), Picknick im Fruhling (Picnic in spring). Another Picnic by Cucuel is in the collection of the Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Liverpool.
The Picnic, Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Liverpool
Highly esteemed in international art circles, Edward Cucuel was an illustrator, portraitist, genre and landscape painter. His enormous popularity among both European and American audiences is explained in part by his own cosmopolitan life which afforded ready exposure to these markets. Although he kept a residence in New York for many years, Cucuel spent most of his career living and working abroad in Paris, Munich, Zurich, Japan and elsewhere.
Cucuel was first drawn to Paris in 1893 to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. There he employed his talents as an illustrator and later an Artist-Correspondent for the Illustrated London News. While forming his financial base, Cucuel continued to study and took advantage of the abounding Bohemian culture. In addition to his exposure at the Ecole, the young artist took part in the teachings of Benjamin Constant and Jean Paul Laurens at the Academie Julian and Leo Putz in Munich. Cucuel’s personal notes from this period in Europe formed the basis for Bohemian Paris of Today (1900), a book written by W. C. Morrow and illustrated by Cucuel. It was not until 1904 that Cucuel began devoting the majority of his time to painting. He was an instant success and even had a painting exhibited in Berlin that same year. Within the next eight years, he exhibited works at the Salon National des Beaux-Arts and Salon d’Automne in Paris, the 1912 Spring Exhibition of the Munich Secession, as well as London’s Grosvenor Gallery and the Fine Arts Society.
Throughout this period, Cucuel kept himself abreast of the works of the early twentieth century’s artistic vanguard, including that of Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault and the German Expressionists. In fact, Cucuel experienced an absorption of Post-Impressionist tendencies which strengthened his en plein air techniques. In 1927, Cucuel’s European popularity and success were confirmed by the publication of Der Maler Edward Cucuel by Fritz von Ostini and later by E.V. Savory’s Colour Plates of Edward Cucuel.
Cucuel returned to New York in the later 1920s and remained there for over ten years. There too he established a fine reputation for his abilities and was invited to exhibit at numerous institutions, including the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Art Institute of Chicago. He also earned a silver medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.
The work of Edward Cucuel is represented at the Detroit Art Institute, Michigan, the Musée Nationale des Arts et Decoration (Louvre), Paris, Maison Braun et Cie, Paris, as well as Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead.
