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Artist or Maker: Carlos Schwabe (German, 1866-1926)

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Notes: Carlos Schwabe was born in Germany in 1866 and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, receiving his artistic training at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. He moved to Paris in 1890, where he met Josephin Péladan (see lot 67) and became involved with the graphic arts of the Symbolist movement. Schwabe's highly refined drawings and watercolours illustrate many important Symbolist texts such as Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, Mallarmé's L'aprés-midi d'un fauneand Le Rêve by Emile Zola. Lavish editions of his coloured etchings, woodcuts and lithographs, were exhibited at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1897.

La femme au Luth depicts a winged maiden in brilliant green, startled by the viewer, as she plays a lute in a walled garden cascading with pink blossum. Schwabe's attention to botanical detail can be compared to the earlier work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Britain. This desire for precision is indicative of a response across the arts to the atmosphere of scientific progress in the latter half of the 19th Century.
The beautiful woman that Schwabe depicts can be seen as a direct contrast to the female figure of death in his most famous work, The death of the grave-digger (1895). In the latter work Death is also portrayed as a beautiful winged woman dressed in green, and her hands strike a similar pose. However, the meanings of the figures themselves could not be more different; the lute, as a symbol of love and music, seems to represent life and noise, in stark opposition to the silent figure of Death.

The critic for Art et Décoration compared Schwabe to Dürer and wrote: 'In the reverberation of his faculties, all of which are excited at the same time, the reflections of tragic, bizarre and mysterious dreams are mixed under the artist's fingers, in which one deciphers the symbolic signs of confused destinies and, at the same time, infinitely touching refinements of feeling'.

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