815 - Hermann Ritzau, house in northern Germany, thatched cottage on a sandy track, Dusseldorf School

Hermann Ritzau, house in northern Germany, thatched cottage on a sandy track, Dusseldorf School Oil/canvas, laid down on hardboard, signed 'H. Ritzau' lower right. North German cottage with a high, moss-grown thatched roof and brick chimney, the white-painted walls with small windows and two doors, repairs to the masonry on the eaves side. To the left adjoins a brick gable with dark boarding, in front of it stacked wood. In the foreground a sandy, rutted track crosses the picture, to its left a meadow with yellow flowers, to the right fruit trees and low scrub. The sky in grey and blue with broadly set clouds occupies the upper half of the picture. Age-appropriate good condition, craquelure, soiled. Image 34 x 53.5 cm (HxW). Framed in a black moulding with a gilt inner edge, frame somewhat bumped, frame width 6 cm. Hermann Ritzau (1866 Wolsdorf – 1922 Helmstedt) studied from 1883 to 1884 at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar and from 1884 to 1893 at the Dusseldorf Academy, where the landscape painter Eugen Duecker was his teacher. He later taught drawing at the Gymnasium Julianum in Helmstedt. As a landscape painter of the Dusseldorf School he travelled the Harz, the Lueneburg Heath and the island of Ruegen. Duecker had led Dusseldorf landscape painting away from romantic composition towards the plein-air study; the sober observation of the everyday and the renunciation of all staffage, as this picture shows, are direct consequences of that training.