840 - O. Mucha, Paul von Hindenburg, portrait watercolour of the field marshal, dated 1921

O. Mucha, Paul von Hindenburg, portrait watercolour of the field marshal, dated 1921 Watercolour/paper, signed 'Mucha' and dated 1921 at centre right. Bust portrait of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg in an oval surround against a grey ground, the face turned frontally towards the viewer. Short-cropped white hair, bushy brows and the distinctive white moustache. He wears a field-grey tunic with a white collar patch and gold shoulder boards, over it a coat with a blue collar and red facings. At his throat the order Pour le Merite, below it an Iron Cross, on the left breast a silver breast star. Age-appropriate good condition. Image 27.5 x 22.5 cm (HxW). Mount, behind glass, framed, frame bumped, overall 41 x 34 cm (HxW). From August 1916 Paul von Hindenburg formed the Third Supreme Army Command together with Erich Ludendorff. After the victory at Tannenberg in 1914 he became the most popular figure of the German Empire; by the end of the 1920s several hundred artists had portrayed him, and printed and painted likenesses hung in middle-class homes throughout the country. The sheet was made in the years immediately before his election as Reich President in 1925. A second watercolour by the same hand shows Erich Ludendorff, so that the two heads of the Supreme Army Command survive as pendants.