Fritz von Uhde

"How it shines from the candles of the Christmas tree through the artist's living room, where the daughters sing 'Silent Night, Holy Night' to their father at the piano, which one of them is playing. And the artist, to make things quite interesting in luminaristic terms, has this candlelight argue with the light of two large lamps." This is how biographer Hans Rosenhagen described the scene that Fritz von Uhde captured between 1902/03 in 1908. Immediately after its completion, the large-format painting was presented at the Munich Secession exhibition, where it immediately found a buyer, presumably the Koblenz industrialist Carl Spaeter. His cosy family life, which still revolved around his daughters, now grown up, was an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Uhde. He painted them doing needlework, reading or idling in the shady arbour of the country house in Percha. During this time, he also created many variations showing them playing music in the evenings. These depictions culminate in this main work. The virtuoso use of light is particularly interesting, with the warm, flickering candlelight of the Christmas tree competing with the cooler glow of the lamps on the piano. The brushwork testifies to a painterly freedom; the areas of colour, some of which run into one another, achieve an almost watercolour-like quality, which was to become so characteristic of Uhde's mature style.