Artists
Wilhelm Runze
German, 1887-1973Wilhelm studied at the Staedel Institute under Wilhelm Amandus Beer and d’O. Sietz. He also studied at the Calarossi Academy in Paris. He specialized in genre, portraits and landscapes. His works rarely appear on the market and are quite sought after. His exhibitions included the National Gallery of Munich.
This painting is a great example of the Post-Impressionist movement. Post-Impressionism in Western painting was a movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that style's inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others.
All of these painters except van Gogh were French, and most of them began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of color and light. The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favor of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colors of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken color. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.