A rare opportunity to acquire a work by Paul Hoecker. This engaging warm light portrait was probably painted c1890s when Hoecker painted a series of Pierrots

Image size 57.5 x 78 cm    Frame size  70 x 90 cm

The painting is in very good condition with no condition issues or repairs, Ready to hang

Paul Hoecker (Höcker) (1854-1910) was a German painter of the Munich School and a founding member of the Munich Secession. He studied in Munich at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste 1874-79, taught by the genre and landscape painter Wilhelm von Diez.. His apprenticeship was in Holland and Paris before returning to Munich in 1884. He exhibited with success in Munich, Berlin (where he received a gold medal in 1886), Paris (notably the Exposition Universelle, 1889 where he was awarded a bronze medal) and Vienna. In 1883, he exhibited with genre paintings from the Netherlands and interiors at the Munich International Art Exhibition, where his paintings combined delicacy of colour and skillful chiaroscuro. In 1883 he traveled again to Paris and Holland. From 1884-88 he lived in Berlin, then returned to Munich and began painting in naturalistic colors with strong lighting effects. During this period he was a friend of Fritz von Uhde, Piglhein Bruno and Max Liebermann.

From 1891 he taught at the Munich Akademie, succeeding F. A. von Kaulbach. He was a popular and successful professor until a scandal around his use of a male model for a painting of the Madonna led to him leaving the Academy. He then had a period in Italy where he stayed with the likewise scandal-hit French poet Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen at Villa Lysis in Capri, where he painted several portraits of Fersen’s lover Nino Cesarini. In 1901, with the scandal largely forgotten, he returned to the family home in the village of Upper Langenau where he continued on his work and his passions. He died from ‘Roman malaria’ after a stay in Italy, in 1910.

Hoecker’s legacy was to shape German art in the 1890s, bridging the gap between the academic approach and modern art. Hoecker‘s works were shown during his lifetime in Munich, Berlin, Paris, Rotterdam, as well as at the world exhibition in Chicago, USA (1893) and the Venice Biennale (1895, 1897, 1899). Since the last exhibition of Hoecker’s artistic estate in 1913, many of his paintings were lost and he was largely forgotten. There has rightly been a rediscovery this century in Germany and Lenbachhaus Munich made the first acquisition by a major gallery in 2025

Publications include Friedrich Boetticher: Painting works of the 19th Century. Dresden, 1891 – 1901. Many reference sources online

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