Portrait of Mrs. Huber, 1929

Already a year earlier, in 1928, Josef Dobrowsky (1889–1964) had won the Elida Prize for the most beautiful female portrait. Similar to Gustav Klimt’s (1862–1918) Blind Man, a contrastive play of light and shadow paints the body into the dark background space. The people portrayed emerge from the dark with their moving allure. In the Portrait of Mrs. Huber, the light source captures her alone. The painting is moving in that it gives an illusion of being a private snapshot from the everyday life of the woman portrayed. In her chemise, with a towel on her head, she looks toward viewers gently but resolutely, protectively placing her left hand on her right shoulder. It may be that a fellow artist Dobrowsky was friends with, Ernst Huber (1895–1960), asked him to make this portrait. In the painters’ colony in Zinkenbach (today Abersee, a part of St. Gilgen Lake Wolfgangssee) the painters spent time together and joined together with Ferdinand Kitt (1887–1961) and Franz von Zülow (1883–1963) in the Neumark Round.

RR, 2021