(Vienna 1793–1865 Hinterbrühl)
Preparing the Celebration of the Wine Harvest, signed, dated Waldmüller (18)60, oil on panel, 63.5 x 81 cm, framed

Provenance:
Oscar Löwenstein Collection (1868-1942), Vienna/London;
Thence by descent to his widow Irma Löwenstein (1890-1975), Vienna/London;
Forced sale to Maria Almas Dietrich in 1938;
Führermuseum Linz, inv. no. 172;
Central Collecting Point, Munich, inv. no. 1741;
Regional Finance Office, Berlin;
On loan from the Federal Republic of Germany to the Neue Pinakothek Munich since 1966;
Restitution to the heirs of Oscar and Irma Löwenstein in 2019.
The Painting is being sold for the benefit of the sight loss charity the Vision Foundation, UK.

Exhibited:
Waldmüller Memorial Exhibition, Salzburg, 1953, no. 142;
Munich, Neue Pinakothek 1981–2019.

Catalogued and illustrated in:
Bruno Grimschitz, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Salzburg 1957, p. 362, no. 938.
Munich 1984, Gemäldekataloge, vol. V, Spätromantik und Realismus, pp. 551 f. ill.;
Munich, Neue Pinakothek 1989, museum catalogue 5th edition, p. 362, ill.
Rupert Feuchtmüller, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Leben, Schriften, Werke, Vienna 1996, p. 520, no. 1023;
Sophie Lillie, Was einmal war. Handbuch der enteigneten Kunstsammlungen Wiens, Vienna 2003, p. 728.

The “Preparing the Celebration of the Wine Harvest” is a large painting in horizontal format, in which the action is staggered on three levels. We look into the semi-darkness of a typical press house, where some young people are busy, happily decorating the old beams with fresh vine leaves for the festival. The lighting is particularly unusual and expressive. Between the direct light sources of the door and window and the indirect lighting from the front, the actual events are happening in the shaded middle ground. The many small interactions between the figures, as well as the materiality of the crumbling plaster on the wall to the left or the golden straw that shimmers out between the ceiling beams, direct the eye to ever new details.

The lot 546 “Preparing the Celebration of the Wine Harvest” and “The Grandparents’ Visit” (lot 589) by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller are two paintings that have been strongly influenced by history in several ways. They speak of Waldmüller’s personal withdrawal from the Viennese art scene and the last phase of his life, spent in the Wienerwald, whilst at the same time bearing witness to the fate of the family of Irma and Oscar Löwenstein and their art collection, the Löwensteins being a family who were persecuted by the Nazi regime.
Both paintings form part of Waldmüller’s late oeuvre, which is characterised by a more volatile and open brushstroke as well as intense light effects. From the 1840s onwards, Waldmüller increasingly came into conflict with the Academy in Vienna and withdrew more and more to Hinterbrühl in the Wienerwald, where he devoted himself primarily to genre painting. The rural population and their simpler way of life inspired him to create multi-figure compositions, characterised by perspective foreshortening and a complex interlacing of the figures.

Until 1938 both paintings were part of the extensive collection of Irma and Oscar Löwenstein, the founder and editor of the liberal-oriented newspaper “Neues Wiener Journal”, founded in 1893. Under National Socialist rule, the couple, who were persecuted because of their Jewish identity, were forced to report all their assets to the authorities, including three paintings by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Before emigrating, the Löwenstein couple were forced to sell these three works in the summer of 1938 to the Munich art dealer Maria Almas-Dietrich, from whom they were later transferred to the special commission in Linz - the ‘Führer Museum’ planned by Adolf Hitler. The Löwensteins managed to escape to Great Britain in the same year, where Oscar Löwenstein died during the war. After the Anschluss in 1938, all Jewish employees and international correspondents of the Neues Wiener Journal were dismissed. The newspaper continued to appear under National Socialist control until the end of January 1939, when it was merged with the Neue Freie Presse and the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. In 2019, after many years of loans to German Federal Museums, the works were finally restituted to the heirs of Oscar and Irma Löwenstein and are now being auctioned off on their behalf.