FRITZ BOEHLE | THE POTATO HARVEST

LaRoche-Ringwald, Basel (and sold, his sale, Eduard Schulte, Berlin, November 29, 1910, lot 16)

Adolph Bensinger, Mannheim (by 1916 and sold, his forced sale, Nagel, Mannheim, February 20, 1940, lot 34, illustrated)

Dr. Hanisch (possibly acquired at the above sale)

Kunsthandlung J.P. Schneider, Frankfurt am Main (by 1972)

Polytechnische Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main (by 1972)

Frankfurter Sparkasse, Frankfurt am Main

Returned to the heirs of Adolph Bensinger in 2012 (and sold, Sotheby's, London, November 20, 2012, lot 43, illustrated)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner 

The art of Fritz Boehle resists classification; while his artistic style and choice of subject is indebted to many of the greatest artists in the history of German Art, such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Thoma, his aesthetic approach is distinctly original. Working in painting, printmaking and sculpture, he attended the Städel Art Institute where he was a colleague of Rudolf Yelin, who attributed the younger Boehle as a major influence on his own work.

The Potato Harvest, a large scale, frieze-like composition of field workers under a cloudy, rain-showered sky, connects Boehle to a long tradition of iconic realist compositions which he would certainly have known, including Jean-François Millet’s The Potato Planters (1861, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and Vincent Van Gogh’s Farmers Planting Potatoes (1884, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, fig. 1). One of the early owners of The Potato Harvest was the prominent collector, Adolph Bensinger, and in his villa in Mannheim, this extraordinary canvas hung alongside other major German works of art by Thoma, Max Liebermann and Adolf Menzel, as well as paintings by Van Gogh, Giovanni Segantini (fig. 2) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, among others.