475 - Lesser Ury

Lesser Ury 1861 Birnbaum – 1931 Berlin – “Cleopatra’s Needle with a View of the Charing Cross Railway Bridge (Hungerford Railway Bridge), London” – (1926) Oil on canvas, 50.2 x 70 cm, 71 x 91 cm (dimensions including frame). Signed lower left by another hand: L Ury. Back: Canvas: damaged estate label, handwritten number in blue: 7—Stretcher: center right: remnant of a round brown label—Molding and decorative frame: upper left in dark blue pen: Gebhardt—in dark blue pen at top center, top right, and bottom center: barely legible sequences of numbers: 7781 and (1227). Frame. —Provenance: Artist’s estate, Berlin (Embenquement in London) / Kurt and Adalbert Ury, Berlin (heirs, 1932) / Kurt Ury, New York (documented, 1944) / Alexander Gebhardt Gallery, Munich (documented, 1966) / Private collection / owned for approximately 40 years by the grandfather, who died in 2016, Horn-Bad Meinberg / Private collection, Detmold - Auction: Paul Cassirer Gallery, Berlin, auction October 21, 1932, No. 108 (Cleopatra’s Needle, no signature indicated; repurchased by heirs) — Exhibition: Lesser Ury, Memorial Exhibition, Galerie St. Etienne, New York, opened March 21, 1944, No. 10 (Monument in London) - Gallery catalog: Alexander Gebhardt Gallery, Munich, 1966 catalog, Still Lifes, Landscapes, People, ill. p. 59 (Cleopatra’s Brooch on the Thames Embankment in London) – Literature: Price Report, Paul Cassirer, Berlin, October 21, 1932, in: *Die Weltkunst*, Vol. 6, Nov. 6, 1932, No. 45, p. 4 (No. 108, sold for 460 RM) An expert opinion by Dr. Sibylle Groß, Berlin, including a photographic analysis dated Oct. 25, 2026, is available. - We thank Dr. Sibylle Groß, Berlin, for confirming the authenticity of the painting. The work will be included in the catalogue raisonné of paintings currently in preparation. - A certificate from the Art Loss Register (ALR Ref: S00277150), London, dated October 19, 2026, is available. In 1926, Lesser Ury was staying in London, where he painted a series of views of the Thames, capturing the city entirely through light and atmosphere. Our painting shows the view of the river from the Victoria Embankment: to the left, the vast, milky-white expanse of water opens up, across which a steamboat trails a rust-red plume of smoke, while the opposite bank and the Charing Cross Railway Bridge blur in the haze. On the right, the shady row of trees along the quay, with its lantern and the dark, steeply rising silhouette of Cleopatra’s Needle, provides a powerful counterbalance. The diagonally running quay wall and the sunlit riverside path draw the eye into the depth of the scene and connect the two halves of the painting. With this tension between the light-flooded emptiness of the river and the densely packed, vibrantly colored vegetation, the painting stands in the tradition of Impressionist views of London, which—since Monet’s Thames series—have been among the great motifs of modern art. At the same time, it is unmistakably Ury: the sketch-like, open brushstrokes, the sensitivity to haze and backlighting, and the condensation of a fleeting moment—all of which also characterize his famous Berlin street scenes. The exceptionally well-documented provenance—from the estate, through the Cassirer auction in 1932 and the New York memorial exhibition in 1944, to the Gebhardt Gallery—makes the work a particularly well-documented testament to Ury’s late oeuvre.