(Albano 1843–1931 Venice)
A Young Lady with a Red Fan, signed, dated Eugenio de Blaas 1897, label on the reverse The Cooling Galleries London, oil on canvas, 114 x 74.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Louis Pisani Picture Galleries, Florence (stamp on the reverse);
Cooling Galleries London;
Private Collection - by inheritance to the Catherine Madden Turner Collection, Zionsville, Indiana, USA;
Private Collection USA.

Compare:
Dorotheum Vienna, 9 November 2020, lot 536, Young Lady with a Red Fan, watercolour on board, 56 x 46 cm.

Eugen Alfons von Blaas grew up in a family of painters and was in close contact with art from his early years on. His father, Carl von Blaas, soon recognised his son’s talent, as well as that of his brother Julius. He spared no effort in supporting them and, as he himself held a professorship in painting at the Academy in Venice, he was able to offer in-depth assistance with their studies. Even Eugen’s early paintings are testament to his work as a stylistically confident and technically mature painter with a very good sense of composition. After helping his father with the frescoes in Vienna’s Arsenal between 1860 and 1872, he moved to Venice for good at the end of the 1880s. There, his artistic activity reached its peak. He drew charming genre scenes that captured the bustling alleys and canals, replete with beautiful women chatting away. These drawings and sketches gave rise to his oil paintings, as is also evident in the present lot.

He probably used the watercolour drawing as a model for the life-size portrait of a young Venetian woman with a red fan and dressed in traditional costume. For the oil version, Eugen von Blaas picked out a detail, depicting the woman from her head to her knees, coquettishly looking past the fan. The background, with its stone wall and greenish-grey landscape, forms a contrast to the delicate, young Venetian woman with her red fan. The picture is almost like a snapshot and the lightness and spontaneity of the drawing is palpable. The charm of the pretty Italian woman, whom Eugen von Blaas was able to stage so skilfully, enchants the viewer to this day. (JP)