30. Landscape with Peasant Women [1878.-1880.]

Nikola Mašić, a renowned painter of genre scenes in landscape, was highly esteemed and distinguished during his creative period at the cusp of 19th and 20th centuries but was almost forgotten in the ensuing decades, until recent times when two extensive, research-based exhibitions were organized in Zagreb with the aim of reassessing his oeuvre. These exhibitions were held at the Modern Gallery (today NMMU), which owns more than a hundred of Mašić's works. They were curated by museum advisor Dajana Vlaisavljević; the first in 2017 under the theme of Croatian modern animalistic painting titled "All Our Animals" to which she included twelve of Mašić's paintings; and the other in 2018 when she organized a critical retrospective of the painter's opus titled "Nikola Mašić – Noble Realist" exhibiting 125 of the painter's most selected works. Included (and reproduced) in this latter exhibition was the painting "Landscape with Farmers" that displays the painter's entirely modernistic conception of landscape painting. Mašić wrote in a review for a newspaper, "one should paint in full light and directly in nature", a sentiment that the curator of the above-mentioned exhibition quotes and then concludes: "The silent man Nikola Mašić painted the world around him as he saw it, building his paintings meticulously and responsibly according to the principles of his education and the spirit of the time." Nikola Mašić spent his childhood and youth with his twin brother Aleksandar, also a painter, in Trieste and Vienna. After completing high school, their life paths diverged. Nikola first attended the Vienna Art Academy, then in 1872 moved to the Munich Academy. Due to frequent illnesses caused by tuberculosis, he had to return to Otočac several times. A series of the painter's studies from Krajina have been preserved from one such break in 1875. He graduated in 1879 and immediately thereafter, the Munich Academy offered him a studio where he produced a significant part of his body of work. From 1878 to 1881, Mašić frequently visited Posavina, where he painted intense water scenes and rural courtyards in the manner of "pure painting", prompted by his study visits to Paris in 1887 and Italian Campagna in 1880, where his first-rate marines and views of Vesuvius were also created. The same year, in a Sava backwater, he painted an outstanding oil painting "Painter in the Marsh". After finally returning to his homeland in 1884, he was appointed professor at the Craft School in Zagreb, and in 1894, director of the Strossmayer Gallery of JAZU. Simultaneously, he was very active in the exhibition scene. BRP

References

Nikola Mašić, Our Pictures, Wreath, Zagreb, 1902., No. 4, p. 64. Dajana Vlaisavljević, Nikola Mašić – Noble Realist (catalogue), Modern Gallery, Zagreb, 2018., p. 46 and reproduction on p. 83.

Dimensions

width 66 cm, height 38 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed bottom left, in brown, "Nik. Mašić"

Research information

The work was exhibited at the retrospective exhibition "Nikola Mašić" in the Modern Gallery in Zagreb, December 18, 2018 - February 1, 2019 and was reproduced in the exhibition catalog under number 66, titled "Landscape with Peasant Women" on pages 82/83.

Dating

1878.-1880.

PROVENANCE

private collection, Zagreb.

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