Cloud Study

Between about 1907 and 1916 Moser painted landscape after landscape, above all the Wolfgangsee, and several cloud studies. In the spring of 1913 he took his wife and two sons to Leysin, in the Swiss Alps, to place the younger boy in a sanatorium, and painted the peak of Le Chamossaire while he was there. Where this small study was made is not recorded. It is about 20 by 30 centimetres, oil on cardboard, and shows almost nothing but sky. A heap of cumulus fills the upper half, lit a strong yellow over violet shadow, and along the bottom edge the dark curve of a hill barely rises into the picture. Moser said he wanted pictures a viewer could walk through with the eyes. The study stayed in his estate after his death in 1918 and came to the Belvedere in 1982, a gift from the art historian Hans Aurenhammer.