Peasant Children Gathering Brushwood, 1886/89

The works from Anton Romako’s (1832–1889) late oeuvre emanate an unsettling threatening atmosphere, as this painting illustrates. It shows two peasant children performing the arduous task of carrying home the twigs they have collected. Looking almost lost, they walk quietly through the gloomy forest, which the artist reduced to dissolved shades of color. The figures, painted with swift, purposeful brushstrokes, emanate a fragility that is further emphasized by the bright highlights. The artist played with the incompleteness of certain parts of the composition in order to create a symbiosis of detailed elaboration and fleetingness. Romako knew how to charge simple scenes with psychologizing aspects and to thus invest them with deeper meaning. We could go as far as to say that the artist was a pioneer of the Expressionist movements that evolved from 1900.

AS, 2021