![Leo Putz - Forest Calm [c.1925]](http://c8.staticflickr.com/6/5495/31127682215_9c338cc7b0_b.jpg)
Painted in Gauting after the artist's return from exile in the Netherlands during the First World War, this painting exemplifies Putz's freely painted compositions of nudes and bathers by the water's edge. The setting for this and so many of Putz's paintings was the lake country around Schloss Hartmannsberg, where the artist and his family summered annually before the War, and again in the 1920s.
Putz (1869 - 1940) was born in Merano, at that time in Austria-Hungary, moving with his family to Munich as a boy. He studied at the Munich Academy, and from 1891-92 at the Académie Julian in Paris under William Bouguereau and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. Despite his academic training, Putz was far more interested in the avant-garde subjects and impressionistic forms of expression being pioneered by his contemporaries, particularly Gauguin and Renoir, which would inform his own work.
[Sotheby’s, London - Oil on canvas, 69 x 76.5 cm]