LEA LITTROW (Trieste 1856 - 1914 Abbazia)
Coast in evening sunlight
oil/wood, 15 x 24 cm
verso personally inscribed with pencil Lea Littrow Abbazia
depicted in catalogue raisonné Leontine von Littrow 2017, p. 312, figure 192, WVLL 4/131
ESTIMATE € 10000 - 12000
STARTING PRICE € 10000
Leo von Littrow, Austrian impressionist, was born Leontine Camilla von Littrow in Trieste. Her father was frigate captain Heinrich von Littrow, cartographer, poet and playwright, head of the Commercial and Nautical Academy in Trieste and Royal Hungarian Maritime Inspector in Fiume (Rijeka). Her mother, Caroline Fanny Barry, came from a family of bankers and merchants in Genoa and Trieste. Leo's grandfather was the imperial court astronomer Johann Joseph von Littrow, who was given hereditary nobility in 1835. An uncle was the astronomer Karl Ludwig von Littrow, head of the Vienna University Observatory and rector of the University of Vienna. He was married to Auguste von Littrow, co-founder of the Vienna Women's Employment Association, the Vienna Women's Home Association and the city's benefactor, who ran a salon. Friendly guests such as Franz Grillparzer, Josef Danhauser, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Ottilie von Goethe and Carl von Zumbusch frequented here. The Viennese painter Hans Canon discovered Leo von Littrow's painting talent. Littrow received her artistic training, after occasional painting lessons with Hans Canon, from around 1875 under the influence of French Impressionism by the Parisian painter Jean d'Alheim, a student of the romantic Alexandre Calamé. After initial successes at exhibitions in Vienna, Bremen, Munich and London, Littrow was considered a successful painter of the sea and the Italian and Dalmatian coastal landscape around 1885. Later, her pergola and garden views became particularly popular. She was close friends with Olga Wisinger-Florian. Littrow developed a light-flooded and pure-coloured, impressionistic individual style. Prince Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, Archduke Karl Stephan of Austria and Crown Princess Stephanie of Austria frequented her studio in Abbazia. Leo and Heinrich von Littrow's closest friends and collectors of their pictures included the industrialist and co-inventor of the torpedo Robert Whitehead and his daughter and son-in-law Alice Gräfin von Hoyos and Georg von Hoyos. After exhibition successes in Vienna (1880), Bremen (1880), London (1886), Budapest (1884), Munich (1893) and Chicago (1893, Colombian World's Fair) and above all through major solo exhibitions in London (1899, 1904, 1906) and In Vienna (1914), Leo von Littrow was the only woman to receive a commission from the new museums of the Viennese court in the mid-1880s: the furnishing painting for the mezzanine halls of the Natural History Museum shows her painting “Coast of Ragusa”. Littrow's works can be found, in the Vienna Museum, in the Picture Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and the Museo Revoltella di Trieste, among other places.
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The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.