1930s Modernist Figurative Gothic House Original Gouache on Paper Signed Josef Presser

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About the artwork: This Modernist painting depicts a mansard-roofed Victorian Second Empire Gothic-feeling mansion with dynamically bold, angled brushwork and … Read more About the artwork: This Modernist painting depicts a mansard-roofed Victorian Second Empire Gothic-feeling mansion with dynamically bold, angled brushwork and a somewhat surrealist perspective.

The term Second Empire refers to the empire that Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) established in France during the mid-1800s. The mansard roof comes from the French architect François Mansart (1598-1666), who used double-sloped roofs so extensively that they were coined mansard, a derivation of Mansart's name.

A man approaches the house from the right, walking past a sculpture of robed woman on a pinnacle. This artwork is matted with glass cover and double-framed, once in lightly gilded brown wood and again in a darker carved deep brown wood shadow frame, ready to hang. Painting dimensions without the frame = 18 x 13 inches.

This Old House
Signed lower left PRESSER

About the Artist: Josef Presser (1907-1967) was born in Lublin, Poland. He studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School, in Europe, and with Bryant Baker, Henry Hunt Clark, Philip Hale, and William James. He was a member of the Philadelphia Watercolor Club and the New Haven Paint and Clay Club and exhibited at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His work is in many museum collections, including the Uffizi, Florence, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia. Presser was active and lived in Massachusetts and New York. (Source: AskArt and Frank S. Schwarz and Son)

Provenance:
Private collection – New York
Private collection – Paris

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