Fruit Tree, Summer 1907

For his painting Fruit Tree, which he created during his summer sojourn in Gmunden on the Traunsee lake in 1907, Richard Gerstl (1883–1908) chose a narrow vertical format. The truncated pickets of the wooden fence on the lower edge of the work are continued in the vertical brushstrokes that illustrate the meadow in which the fruit tree is growing. The vertical drift is broken by the woodpile that protrudes diagonally into the pictorial space. The individual parts of the picture display different structures. The pieces of fruit hinted at in red dots of color still recall Gerstl’s Pointillist period around 1906, while the mountains on the upper edge of the picture are formed by powerful loops of color. His style of painting reveals the artist’s free and expressive creative process, which also earned him the nickname “the Austrian van Gogh.”

AGW, 2022