Austrian 19th century oil painting. Girl Wearing Lily Pad Hat. Signed lower left, M. Wunsch. Oil on canvas. Good condition, light craquelar and a few small bits of retouch near the signature and by the lily pad stem. Measures 25 inches high x 33. Frame measures 31 inches x 39 inches.
Marie (Mizzi) Wunsch, genre painter, born on 17 July 1862 in Gersthof (Weinhaus) in Vienna. As a small girl she participated in the drawing lessons given by Professor Taubinger to her sisters, where her keen sense of observation already manifested itself. Nevertheless, her talent was not encouraged. Until 1880, when she gained admission to the preparatory school of the Austrian Museum to study with Professor Minnigerode, Hrachowaner and in Rieser's studio, from where she moved to Abbazia with the mother after two years of study because of her fragile health. She kept drawing and painting and eventually moved to Venice where she received further instructions from Eugene v. Blaas. There she painted a self-portrait, which exemplified the teaching of this school.
Thereafter, she established her own studio, first in Venice and then in Murano. She produced a series of ever new compositions taken from children's lives, which through their humor and fresh immediacy gained a large number of friends and admirers, who had not the slightest knowledge of her progressive illness.
She painted On the Watch where a lad secretly watches a small girl eating cherries with glowing eyes; the jubilant mirth of the Swing, an invitation from a childlike Marinaro for The Abduction of Helena, the lamentable trio in Troubled friendship, the new Apple of Paris, the siege conscious and timid Card Players, Ant and Grille the First Dance, the Seriousness of Life, and Rough Start, also the Audifax and Hadumoth scene out of Scheffel's Ekkehard, then last but not least The Mystery which was the highlight at the Munich Art Exhibition in 1894 and had to be copied, with slight alterations, five times by the artist. The topic was reproduced in photography, woodcut, engraving, color printing, even as a plastic group in plaster, porcelain and metal castings.
There were other character heads and figures, which in addition of other works from her estate appeared in two major series in postcards by Ackermann's Reproduction in hundreds of thousands of copies all over the world. These successes beautified the last years of her short life.
Her main works became well-known through the Illustrierte Zeitung, On Land and Sea, in Gazebo and Homes well as in Velhagen & Klasing's Monatshefte.