(Herrnhut 1826–1882 Wahren near Brixen)
Grain Harvest in the Mountains, signed (in ligature), dated ALier 1857 München, oil on canvas, 98.5 x 150 cm, framed

Exhibited:
Gallery D. Heinemann, Munich. Exhibition, October 1909;
E. A. Fleischmann‘s Hofkunsthandlung. Gedächtnis- Ausstellung Munich 1926.

Catalogued and illustrated in:
Theodor Mennacher,. Adolf Lier und sein Werk, Munich 1928, Catalogue raisonne, p. 50, no. 98, fig.. plate 1.

The son of a goldsmith, Adolf Lier born on 21 May 1826 in Herrnhut (Oberlausitz) near Dresden. He showed drawing skills and an interest in painting at a very early age. In Dresden, where the boy occasionally stayed with his aunt during the holidays, he frequently visited the Gemäldegalerie, which made a strong impression on him. He would allude to those visits in a letter written by his mother Sophie later in life, dated 23 November 1859.Adolf Lier was a pupil of the landscapist Richard Zimmermann (1820 - 1875) in Munich from the end of 1849. He then studied under J. B. Berdellé (1813 - 1876) and devoted himself to the study of landscape painting. Lier‘s first landscapes, German town and village pictures, bore in their loving detailing the stamp of that post-Romanticism which shows in similar works by A. L. Richter (1803 - 1884).

As Theodor Mennacher, author of the catalogue raisonné, points out, the painter reached a first peak in his works as early as the mid-1950s. He produced intimate landscape prospectuses with figurative staffage and the mood of rendering open-air realism. Lier‘s virtuosity as a colourist is evidenced in the depiction of the atmosphere of light, the formation of clouds and the countless finely graded shades of green and yellow, especially in the harvest landscapes.

One of his major works from the period of 1857 is the present lot „Summer Day“ set near Habach in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps. Adolf Lier is regarded as one of the first mediators between French and German art, for he brought this view and concept of open-air realism from Barbizon to Munich, where he was a leading figure in the field of landscape painting.