Mela Muter, Boats in the harbor

Technique: oil, board

Dimensions: 38 x 46 cm

signed p.g. (illegible)
inscribed on back

The painting is framed.

Additional charges: +5% / 3% Droit de suite

Provenance: private collection Germany; private collection Warsaw

Biography:
Born 1876 in Warsaw, died 1967 in Paris

Mela Muter, actually Maria Melania Mutermilch, née Klingsland, one of the most interesting artists of the so-called École de Paris; despite her studies with Miłosz Kotarbiński in Warsaw and at the Parisian Académie de la Grande Chaumiére and Académie Colarossi, she considered herself self-taught, claiming that the real school of painting for her was only her contacts with outstanding artists and their art.
Befriended by many artists and personalities (including R. Rolland, A. Zweig. R.M. Rilke, A. France. G. Clemenceau), she lived permanently in Paris from 1901, obtaining French citizenship in 1927. She traveled several times to Spain and Switzerland, and always maintained lively contacts with Poland, working for the country and taking part in its artistic life. Primarily revered as a portraitist, she also painted landscapes and still lifes. She devoted many paintings to themes of motherhood, suffering and old age. In her early period, she painted paintings maintained in the convention of realism and dark color tones (Portrait of L. Staff, Chess Game). Later, in the "French" period, she lightened her palette, used clear contours and, tending towards geometrization, stylization of forms.
In recent years, large ensembles of the artist's works have been presented in several exhibitions at the National Museum in Warsaw ("Polish Artists," "Collection of Ewa and Wojciech Fibak," and, above all, in a large exhibition of the artist's paintings from the collection of Lina and Boleslaw Nawrocki).
(source: agraarr.pl)