Sailing Boat (Segelboot)

Sailing Boat (Segelboot, c. 1897) is an early Pictorialist marine subject in gum bichromate from the Städel Museum collection in Frankfurt. The sheet is characteristic of Dr. Heinrich Kühn's atmospheric water studies from the late 1890s, in which a single vessel, a softened horizon, and a layered pigment surface combine to dissolve the documentary anchor of the photograph in favor of a painterly mood — a programmatic Pictorialist gesture aligned with the contemporaneous tonalist painting of Whistler and the Munich Secession. The work belongs to the early phase of Kühn's gum bichromate practice, before he developed the Platingummidruck (gum-over-platinum) hybrid for which he became internationally celebrated; its placement in the Städel's collection alongside other key Pictorialist sheets gives it institutional canonical weight. Dr. Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944), Austrian-German pictorialist, trained as a physician before settling in Innsbruck in 1888. He led the German-Austrian wing of Pictorialism as a co-founder of the Wiener Kleeblatt (Vienna Trifolium) with Hans Watzek and Hugo Henneberg, and was a close correspondent of Alfred Stieglitz, who published him in Camera Work pl. 18 (1905) and pl. 33 (1911), and Edward Steichen. He was among the first European photographers to adopt the Lumière Autochrome in 1907. His prints are held at the Albertina Vienna, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Städel Museum Frankfurt, and Galerie Maier Innsbruck. Process Transposition Maison Picturale: Kühn's early marine gum bichromates are transposed at the Maison Picturale Paris atelier via Aquaprint MP, the non-toxic Vision Picturale reformulation, which preserves the atmospheric water tonality of Sailing Boat without the historical dichromate hazard. Kühn entered the public domain in 2015.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / Städel Museum (Public Domain)