Farmhouse with a Stove

Pärsimägi trained at the Pallas school in Tartu, the centre of modern art in newly independent Estonia between the wars, and he became known as one of its boldest colourists. This everyday farmhouse interior is really an excuse for colour. He pushes a plain peasant room, a brick stove, a bare wall, into vivid heated tones, and turns the shift from the bright outdoors to the dim inside into the real subject. By the late 1930s he was working in Paris. Arrested there by the Gestapo in 1941, he was deported and killed at Auschwitz in 1942, at 40. Many of the paintings he left are now gathered in the Tartu Art Museum, a short walk from where he studied.