859 - Sawo Popowitsch Iwanow, farmer with pipe and shouldered scythe, genre scene, Bayreuth painter

Sawo Popowitsch Iwanow, farmer with pipe and shouldered scythe, genre scene, Bayreuth painter (1887 Sarajevo – 1955 Bayreuth), oil on hardboard, signed lower left "Sawo P. Iwanow", handwritten label on the reverse, signed by the artist, farmer in profile to the right with dark peaked cap, grey moustache and pipe in his mouth, light shirt, dark trousers, the scythe over his left shoulder, on the left a low sun above a blue-violet range of hills, meadows and fields, on the right a dark group of trees and a light-coloured wall, good condition commensurate with age, image 28x37 cm (HxW), framed, frame width 5 cm Sawo Popowitsch Iwanow was born in Sarajevo in 1887, lived in Vienna and Berlin after the First World War, where he worked as a drawing teacher, and after a stay in Kasendorf settled in Upper Franconia in 1939, finally in Bayreuth. There the academic painter and retired professor also worked on the restoration of older paintings and remained in the town until his death in 1955. In 1951, together with Friedrich Böhme, Rudolf Jakubek and Ferdinand Röntgen, he founded the Freie Gruppe Bayreuth, an artists' association that existed until 1981 and whose influence extended to Hof, Bamberg, Kulmbach and Coburg. The Kunstmuseum Bayreuth holds works by him, including an ox team and a motif from Creußen. His subjects include a blacksmith at work, a cockfight and a staircase in a Franconian village; with the farmer and the shouldered scythe, the present picture stands in the tradition of rural genre painting, which takes country life and work in the fields as its subject.