Born in Hungary, Adolf Hirschl was raised in Vienna, where in 1878 he obtained a scholarship to the Akademie der bildenden Künste. In 1880 his first major canvas, Farewell: Scene from Hannibal Crossing the Alps, won a prize for historical painting. This was followed two years later by a second prize that allowed him to visit Rome, where he lived until 1884. On his return to Vienna Hirschl soon established a successful career as a painter, receiving numerous commissions and producing grand, complex compositions that were greatly admired. He exhibited his paintings throughout Europe, and reached the peak of his Viennese career when he won the Imperial Prize in 1891. Within a few years, however, his work began to be overshadowed by the more progressive and radical paintings of Gustav Klimt and the other artists of the Secession movement. In 1898 he adopted the Hungarian name Hirémy and soon afterwards moved to Rome, where a retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 1904. Four years later his painting of Souls on the Banks of the Acheron, painted in 1898, was exhibited at the Imperial Jubilee exhibition in Vienna, where it was purchased by the state for large sum of money; it is now in the Österreichische Galerie in Vienna. Unfortunately, a number of Hirémy-Hirschl’s important history paintings are lost, notably The Plague in Rome of 1884. He remained largely immune to the latest avant-garde trends in art, both in Vienna and in Rome, preferring to work in his own distinctive manner. As one contemporary critic wrote, ‘He is a very hard as well as a very scrupulous worker, and one who goes on his own way undaunted, never imitating or letting himself be influenced by what others are doing.' (1) One of his last large-scale canvases was the huge Sic Transit..., a vast allegory of the fall of the Roman Empire, which was completed in 1912. Hirémy-Hirschl continued to live and work in Rome until his death, devoting much of his time to smaller paintings, seascapes and nature studies.
A remarkably accomplished draughtsman, Hirémy-Hirschl produced a large number of figure studies in charcoal or chalk, as well as nature studies in pastel, watercolour and gouache. His studies of female nudes in particular have a directness and overt sexuality that is often mirrored in his paintings.
The present sheet is, in all likelihood, a preparatory figure study for one of Hirémy-Hirschl’s allegorical pictures. A close comparison may be made with a drawing of a model in a similar pose (2), which is a study for a painting of The Birth of Venus of c.1910-1912. Alternatively, the drawing may be a study for one of the women in the background of Hirémy-Hirschl’s Bathing Women of c.1900; a painting exhibited in Rome in 1938 (3).
Notes
1. Helen Zimmern, ‘Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl’, The Art Journal, December 1900, pp.356-357.
2. Sansepolcro, Museo Civico, Adolf Hirémy Hirschl 1860-1933, exhibition catalogue, 1991, pp.26-27.
3. Rome, Galleria L’Antonina, Adolf Hirémy 1860-1933: Mostra personale e vendita, 1938; illustrated in London, Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd., Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl, exhibition catalogue, 1987, unpaginated, with nos.20-23.
