Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

At this point in his career, Waldmüller had fully embraced the Biedermeier style and chose subjects appealing to the growing middle-classes. In the present lot, the artist depicts a young woman selling flowers set within a field surrounded by larger, stoic buildings. The rich colors bring to life her beauty and youth and capture the bourgeois taste of the time in a striking manner.

A note about the provenance:

Lots 10, 87, 91 and 92 come from the noteworthy collection of David Goldmann, an Austrian businessman who fled his home country with his family in 1938 after the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany. Goldmann amassed a significant fine and decorative arts collection consisting of Italian, Northern and Austrian paintings as well as Viennese porcelain and furniture. Soon after the Anschluss, the Gestapo deemed Goldmann’s apartment and contents as “enemy property”.¹ The most valuable items of the group were removed and reserved for Hitler’s Führermuseum while the rest were auctioned off by the Dorotheum.

The reverse of the paintings memorializes this complicated period of their history with labels noting each depot and storage facility the paintings moved to while under German control. After being taken to the central depot of the Kunsthistoriches Museum, the paintings were then stored in the Altaussee salt mine, which was then seized by the U.S. Army on May 8, 1945, and the artworks transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point marking the beginnings of the restitution process. Goldmann managed to successfully have most of these items returned to him in New York by the late 1940s. The paintings and drawings have remained in the family since this time.

1. A. Reininghaus, Recollecting. Raub und Restitution, exhibition catalogue, Vienna 2009, p. 133.