(Oberndorf 1891–1958 Kitzbühel)
Alpine pastures in the snow, circa 1935, signed A. Walde, oiltempera on cardboard, 57 x 46 cm, in the original Walde frame, (K)

A copy of the Certificate from Prof Gert Ammann, Völs, 5 August 2012, is available

Provenance:
Private Ownership, Germany

Comparative works:
Gert Ammann, Alfons Walde, 1891–1958, 4th edition, Verlagsanstalt Tyrolia, Innsbruck 2001, page 89

The landscape painting competition of 1924 acted as a starting point for Walde, leading him to develop a simple, expansive view of nature. His compositions would now combine the full power of his expressive post-war pictures and the full weight of natural forms as he perceived them. The distant mountain ranges around Kitzbühel and the soaring barrier of the Wilder Kaiser in the background stood for landscape per se in his work. Almost primeval and amorphous in the massiveness, the planes and volumes, which in the way that he models them always tend towards three-dimensionality, nonetheless seem very considered and are executed with immense sensitivity by the artist. He interweaves the attributes of this landscape - the houses, huts, roofs and shady areas - in a consciously harmonious fashion; they are not just used as backdrops. Walde’s soft, at times, dry impasto style of painting time and again achieves fresh nuances, new interplays of light values, which vibrate beyond any occurrence in nature. Landscape also signifies, for him, a constrast with the sky. It is rare for him to extend the mountains right up to the upper edge of the image. The intensity of the blue of the sky always functions as a key visual element in his work. The compositional gradation from slightly raised foreground via the deeply set middle ground and on to the high backdrop of the soaring mountain massif behind is a feature of Walde’s landscape painting. He rarely constrains his compositional motifs by framing them; the panorama effect predominates. Alpine pastures in the snow, Tratt Alpine pastures and the many smaller motifs with their Alpine huts, weighed down by the weight of the snow, are replete with reality, and still exist today...
Gert Ammann, excerpt from the above-listed literature

The snow motif, such as can be seen in Alpine pastures in the snow (1926) are conceived monumentally and they convey the atmospheric power of an apparently untouched natural world. Moreover, they are amongst some of the artist’s most important works. In comparision to the landscape motifs of his painter colleagues in the Tyrol, such as Max von Esterle, Gustav Bechler, Wilhelm Nikolaus Prachensky, Hans Weber-Tyrol and Oskar Mulley, Walde’s pictures declare their singularity.
Gert Ammann, excerpt from ‘Schauplatz Kitzbühel, Walde und die Tiroler Malerei seiner Zeit’, exh. cat., Alfons Walde, Leopold Museum, Vienna 2006