Michael Neher
(1798 - Munich - 1876)

Peasant Women Breaking Flax
1831

Oil on canvas
Signed with the initials MN and dated 1831
Stamped on the stretcher and with incised number 3466,
a further number 1287/11 in blue chalk

43.7 x 34.5 cm

Michael Neher enrolled at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1813, studying under the court painters Matthias Klotz and Angelo Quaglio the Elder (1778-1815). He completed his studies in 1816 and in 1819 moved to Italy. He spent the first three years living in Trento, Milan and Trieste before moving to Rome, where he lived for two years. He worked in the studio of the painter Heinrich Maria von Heß to develop his skills in architecture and genre painting. In Rome, he moved in the same circles as the Nazarenes.

Neher returned to Munich in 1825 and decided to pursue a career as an independent artist. He also took up a post as conservator for the Munich Kunstverein. He exhibited regularly, in 1833 showing a painting titled Market Square in Perugia at the Kunstverein.

The present painting was executed in 1831, six years after Neher's return from Italy. He had taken home with him a large body of sketches focussing on architecture and everyday life in Italy. They were to serve as the basis for many of his later oil paintings well into the mid-1830s.[1] In the present painting he has chosen to depict a somewhat unusual motif. Two young women are shown engaged in breaking sheaves of flax while at the same time conversing with a young man. The architecture of the village is southern Italian and the houses have an upper storey. The scene is portrayed with great attention to detail, in, for example, the embroidered cloth silhouetted against the sky at the left.

In 1837 Neher turned increasingly to the depiction of German topographical scenes. He specialized in city and town views in Bavaria and Swabia - town halls, cathedrals, churches, marketplaces and buildings of historic interest. He executed the decorative schemes after designs by Moritz von Schwind for both the Saal des Schwanritters and the Heldensaal at Schloss Hohenschwangau. Neher's late work is devoted almost exclusively to architecture painting.[2]

[1] Examples are Women at a Well, Olevano, 1826, oil on canvas, 72.5 x 91 cm, Georg Schäfer Museum, Schweinfurt; and Port of Sorrento, 1831, oil on canvas, 35 x 44 cm, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

[2] For a biography of Neher, see Friedrich von Boetticher, Malerwerke des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, II, Leipzig 1942, p.132-4.