The painting Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt has been on display at the National Gallery in London's Trafalgar Square since February 20, 2023. It is the first work by the German expressionist Max Pechstein in the museum's collection, which strives to present German painting of the early 20th century more intensively.
The 1910 portrait shows the 15-year-old daughter of the wealthy Berlin municipal secretary Max Cuhrt, who was one of Pechstein's most important patrons and even set up a studio for him in his house on Kurfürstendamm. Cuhrt and his family lived in the most spacious apartment in the building that he had built by the architect Bruno Schneidereit. The painter and patron had met two years earlier when Schneidereit commissioned Pechstein to decorate the stairwell in Cuhrt's house .
After Pechstein had portrayed Max Cuhrt's wife in 1908, he was commissioned to paint his daughter Charlotte in 1910. The result reflects Max Pechstein's stay in Paris in 1907-08, where the member of the Expressionist artists' group Die Brücke was influenced by the Fauvists around him like Henri Matisse and Kees van Dongen. The use of color borrowed from the Fauves is reflected in the portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt, which has an altar-like appearance thanks to the frame made by Bruno Schneidereit.
Related: Matisse: Master of the Fauves
"Brilliant colour was a clarion call of contemporary painting in France from the late 1880s onwards," explains Christopher Riopelle, curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery. "Here, Pechstein, an early admirer of Van Gogh and recently back in Berlin after a Paris sojourn where he discovered another great colourist, Matisse, declares that it will play a key role in German avant-garde painting too."
Related: Kees van Dongen: The Fauvist Portraitist
The National Gallery bought the Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt for GBP 630,300 (approx. $756,262) in the Expressionism: Germany, Austria and Beyond auction, which took place at Bonhams in London on November 16, 2022. The acquisition was made possible by the estate of the late Martha Doris Bailey, a former French teacher from Hutton Rudby, and her husband Richard Hillman Bailey. Her estate included about $7 million worth of land in London, the sale of which was used to fund the acquisitions.
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"Mrs Bailey’s extraordinarily generous request has enabled the purchase of a superb painting by Max Pechstein, an artist unrepresented until now in any national collection," said Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, in a statement.
As early as 2006, the National Gallery, also with the support of the estate of Martha Doris Bailey, was able to acquire a painting by a German artist: Afternoon in the Tuileries Garden by Adolph von Menzel from 1867, which was created in Berlin after a stay in France.
