Eesti kunsti oksjonid

Oil on canvas. 1893.
Signature: Winkler 93

The picturesque Tiskre beach near Tallinn has been frequently depicted in art for understandable reasons, and it also provided inspiration for Carl Alexander von Winkler (1860-1911), who often visited Estonia to paint, alongside his international career. The acclaimed artist’s oil paintings mainly belong to his earlier creative period, as he later devoted himself more to watercolor.

Exhibited at the Winkler Memorial Exhibition held at the Riga Art Museum in 1911, “Tiskre” bears the stamp of a very capable conveyer of moods. It most likely got there thanks to the first director of the Riga Art Museum, the art historian Wilhelm Neumann who had great respect for Winkler. It was on his initiative that many excellent works by Baltic Germans, including Winkler’s, ended up in the Riga Museum’s collection, and the archives also preserved records of works in private hands.

The artist gives the impression that the viewer is sitting with him, paints in hand, on a rock or in a boat, enjoying the warm, soft glow of the evening sunset, listening to the quiet splashing of the water and admiring the endless play of nature. The powdery glow of peach-pink in the sky has an eternal and calming effect – one gets the impression that the artist has also transferred his own inner peace to the canvas while painting it.

Text: Mai Levin, Katre Palm