Emil Block German 1884-1966
Sendung, c.1920s

£1,350

Gouache on paper
Titled (verso)
44cm × 23cm (56cm × 39cm framed)

Emil Block completed an apprenticeship as a painter in Leipzig, then working in the studio of church painter Richard Schultz until 1904 and in the studio of Richard Hesse between 1913 and 1945. He painted murals for restaurants and cafés, designed stained glass windows, and carried out various types of restoration work. He taught himself to paint portraits, figurative subjects, landscapes, and still lifes. Block increasingly worked as an oil and watercolor painter and as a draftsman. He painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and animal pictures, as well as allegorical and mythological scenes. This work definitely has a homoerotic flavour, rooted in the traditions of German Romanticism.