Paul Baum Lot n° 107

Paul Baum Flood near Hyères with scrub trees and reeds on the bank Around 1900 Oil on canvas. 46 x 55 cm. Framed. Signed 'Paul Baum' lower left. - In immaculate, fresh condition. Hitzeroth F 217 (Q5) Provenance Private collection Bremen Exhibitions Kassel 1959 (Städtische Kunstsammlung zu Kassel), Paul Baum, no. 264 (supplementary catalog from 1960) More than almost any other German Impressionist, Paul Baum incorporated the ideas and techniques of the Pointillists into his work and transformed them into his own style. Born in Meissen, Saxony, in 1859 and educated at the Weimar Academy, he became acquainted with the Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro during a visit to Paris in 1890. After a brief Impressionist phase, Baum soon turned to the more contemporary Pointillist technique, in which the color spectrum is systematically broken down into unbroken tones and applied in small dabs. He probably also saw this in Theo van Rysselberghe, with whom he worked for a summer in Knokke, Belgium. From around 1890, Baum painted exclusively in the Neo-Impressionist style, which he retained and refined throughout his career. Apart from a few urban themes at the beginning of his career, Baum was primarily interested in landscape painting. The motif of trees, especially willows, by a stream - or, as in our picture, by a river - was one of his preferred subjects. The expanses of water thus offered a variety of possibilities for attractive reflections. In the painting "Flooding at Hyères" on offer, he captured the turbulent water, but also the branches and reeds jutting into the picture from the right in a pointillist application of paint. However, unlike Georges Seurat, for example, Baum worked with a generally freer application of paint - mostly shorter or longer strokes and small areas of color that lend movement and atmosphere to the landscape painting.