Louis Michel Eilshemius - Afternoon Wind [1899]


Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864 - 1941) was an American painter. One of the most striking features of Eilshemius’ artistic development is the dramatic shift from his charming late-19th-century landscapes in the Barbizon manner to the eccentric, frequently disturbing subjects and idiosyncratic style of the later period. Dominated by female nudes, this work is characterised by a colourful expressionism in which personal fantasy, growing directly from the experience of his life and travels, is more important than the impact of the Armory Show or modernist theory. After being hit by a car in 1932 he was confined to his home where he railed against his misfortunes in an endless flow of letters to the New York press. Despite three simultaneous one-man exhibitions in New York in 1939, the artist was by this time reduced to a state of helpless poverty. He died of pneumonia in 1941.

[Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 91.4 cm]
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