811 - Bela Belavary, reclining female nude beneath flowering lilac, nude on a green meadow, circa 1900

Bela Belavary, reclining female nude beneath flowering lilac, nude on a green meadow, circa 1900 Oil on canvas, laid down on card, signed lower right, circa 1900, verso the remains of a blue paper label of the Viennese firm Franz Kehle & Co. as well as chalk inscriptions. Reclining female nude in full length on a green meadow, the right arm raised above the head and reaching for the violet and white panicles of a flowering lilac bush, the head with long dark brown curls thrown back. Warm rosy flesh tones, the meadow in lively hatched shades of green. Condition commensurate with age, retouching, creases and pressure marks with paint loss. Image 25 x 37.5 cm (h x w), in a gilt moulding with a lancet frieze, frame with knocks, frame width 2 cm. The reclining female nude in the open air belongs to the pictorial themes that freed themselves in the 19th century from their ties to mythological and religious subjects. Since the Renaissance the nude study from the model had served the study of anatomy and proportion in studios and academies; in the 19th century the term nude became a school term of portrait and genre painting. With Manet, Renoir and Degas, people in everyday situations and under the open sky entered the picture, and the combination of a nude figure and a spring landscape stands in this plein-air tradition of painting around 1900. The lilac (Syringa vulgaris) flowers from April to May in shades of bluish and reddish violet through to white; in 1560 the imperial envoy Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq brought it from Constantinople to Vienna, and from the mid-19th century hybrid cultivars made it a widespread garden shrub.