This late 19th-century oil painting by German artist Robert Heinrich (1864-1950) depicts two characterful portrait studies. It was produced in Berlin in 1886 when the artist was around 22 years old. It's essentially a page from the young artist's working life. 

Two male heads emerge independently from the warm brown ground of the cardboard, without bodies, setting or narrative. Heinrich is interested simply in the business of looking: the turn of a head, the fall of light across a cheek, the construction of an eye and the particular character of a face.

The principal study is especially accomplished. An older gentleman, sporting a moustache and pointed grey beard, looks upwards and away from us. Heinrich builds his features with economical strokes, placing brighter touches across the nose, forehead and collar against deep areas of brown and black. Despite its abbreviated handling, there is a sense of personality.

Alongside him, a second head is approached quite differently. Here Heinrich has left much of his preliminary drawing visible, concentrating the paint around the sitter's eyes, nose and brow while allowing the remainder to dissolve into lines and unfinished passages. We can almost see the artist deciding what matters as he works.

Heinrich received an academic artistic education and his surviving early works demonstrate a considerable interest in drawing, anatomy and portraiture. A self-portrait is known from 1884, while groups of male figure studies survive from the later 1880s and early 1890s. This piece, therefore, belongs to an important formative period when he was developing the observational skills that would underpin his long career.

Those same instincts subsequently took Heinrich outdoors. From the mid-1880s onwards, he became an assiduous recorder of Berlin, Schöneberg and the surrounding countryside, painting old buildings, waterways, fields and industrial sites as the expanding city gradually transformed them.

This little painting suggests that the habit began early. Whether confronted by a human face or a disappearing corner of Berlin, Heinrich wanted to look carefully, understand what was before him and record it.

Signed in the lower left and held in a simple gilt frame.

Learn more about Robert Heinrich in our directory.

Medium: Oil on board
Overall size: 17” x 14” / 43cm x 35cm
Year of creation: 1886
Labels & Inscriptions: Signed/dated on the reverse.
Provenance: Private collection, Germany.
Condition: Cleaned. Frame in excellent condition.
Our reference: BRV2308