Baisch, Hermann (1846-94; German)
Dutch Pastures, Morning 1885
Oil on canvas, 81.4 x 141.2 cm
Purchased, 1888
National Gallery of Victoria (p.313.5-1)

This canvas, illustrated in the 1894 and 1905 NGV catalogues, was purchased from the German gallery at the 1888 Centennial International Exhibition in Melbourne. NGV 1894 indicates that the artist was born in Dresden, and elected Professor at the Karlsruhe Academy in 1880. His rustic scenes were evidently strongly influenced by Dutch 17th-century art and the Barbizon School.

The motif of cows seen against morning sunlight also interested local painters (see e.g. Scheltema Driving in the cows, sunrise {1895} NGV [PA]); and it continued to exercise the imagination of Australian artists into the next century: compare for example Elioth Gruner’s Spring Frost (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1919).           

Refs.

AR 1889, p.41; NGV 1894, p.12 (I.La Trobe Gallery, no.10; ill.); NGV 1905, p.33 (I.La Trobe Gallery, no.60; ill.) [£170]

For this work, see (with details and reproduction; also noting further details on the work and its original frame, made in Munich). For the artist, see Bénézit I, pp.991-92, AKL 6 (1992), pp.331-32 (mentioning the present canvas); and http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O122899/horses-and-cattle-in-a-oil-painting-baisch-hermann/ (a painting held in the Victoria & Albert Museum). Gruner’s Spring Frost is reproduced in Grishin Australian Art (2013), p.183