Landscape

The signature in the lower left corner reads Jean Egger. He was born Hans, in a mining town in Carinthia, and used the French form of his name after he settled in Paris in 1924. The Belvedere still lists this canvas under a French title as well, Paysage. It dates from 1930. The paint is laid on thick and pulled into loops and hooks with the brush. Trees rise as dark blue strokes against a white sky, and the ground beneath breaks into red, orange and yellow, with little to separate field from bush. The picture's later path is documented. In 1971 it went through the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna to the local collector Peter Parzer, and it came to the Belvedere with his bequest in 2012.