Adolf Hiremy-Hirschl (Timişoara, Hungary, 1860 – Rome, 1933)

“Aphrodite”

Oil on canvas
Signed : A Hiremy
Circa 1893
110,7 x 275,6 cm (without frame)
144 cm x 308,30 cm (with frame)
This painting was exposed in the Havre Museum (France) for the exhibition “born from the foam and the dreams” (see the catalogue below)

Many paintings of the painter are exposed in the Museum Belvedere (Vienna, Austria), in the Museum of Dallas (USA) and in the MET (New-York, USA)

Hiremy-Hirschl was born in 31 january 1860 in Timişoara, who is part of Hungary. He went, when he was young, in Vienna to study and received a scolarship for the Academy of beaux-arts of Vienna in 1878. He wons his first price two years later with ” Farewell : Scene of Hannibal crossing the Alps” In 1882, he won a price that get him to go to Rome. His trip to Rome had a great influence on his choice of subjects. After his return to Vienna, he painted ” The plague in Rome” (1884), a lost work today. He received good critics and won the imperial price in 1891 and in 1898 the great gold medal of the state. In 1901, he received during the Great Exhibition of art of Berlin the small gold medal
in the 1890’s, he was in a scandal, he had an affair with a married woman Isabella Henriette Victoria Ruston, he will marry her. The couple will have a daughter, Maud. In 1899, he changed his name Hirschl for Hiremy-Hirschl. He leaves Vienna for Rome, where he lived his last 35 years as a member of the expatriates artists in 1904, 70 of his works were exposed during a retrospective. he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca in 1911
One of his last works is “Sic Transit…” (1912), an immense polyptych allegory of the fall of the roman empire and the rise of christianism. His heirs kept his workshops for decades after his death. A large number of his drawings, watercolors, pastels and sketches in oil were made public only in the 1980’s. He dies in Rome the 7 april 1933

(Bilbliography : encyclopédie wilkipedia.org)