Willow trees at a brook

A successful and well-connected artist active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily in Vienna and Dresden, Emilie Mediz-Pelikan produced an impressive body of paintings and drawings, the large majority of which are landscapes. Following her premature death at the age of 47, her husband, the painter Karl Mediz, withdrew from public life, and her work fell into relative obscurity until the 1980s, when it began to be featured in museum exhibitions and publications.

This signed and dated drawing is a superb example of Mediz-Pelikan's work, exemplifying her increasingly expressive approach to landscape in the 1890s. Here, the subtle, diffuse application of crayon in the sky and grass contrast with the bold strokes and selective scratching that capture the bark, spindly branches, and gnarled forms of the pollard willows. Dynamic spatial effects are achieved with the trees that grow beyond the top edge of the sheet, the shadows that sprawl across the grass at right, and the brook that extends to the very edge of the picture plane and draws our eye into the composition before bending sharply and receding into the distance at left.

The drawing finds close comparison with two oil paintings by Mediz-Pelikan, both dating to 1893 (both private collection, Vienna). These works also depict a brook winding through a field with willow trees growing on either side of the water, though in both oils the grass is dotted with many more flowers and the trees are not all pruned. Whether the artist returned to the same site to draw the somewhat changed landscape two years later or imagined the latter as a variant of the oil paintings is not clear.