August Wolf
(German, 1842 - 1915)
The Venetian Festival
oil on canvas
signed and dated AWolf/1880 (lower right)
79 1/4 x 118.5 inches.

Provenance:
Sold: Freeman's, Philadelphia, February 23, 2021, lot 53

Dr. Herbert W. Rott from the Neue Pinakothek in Munich has assisted in the cataloguing of this lot at the time of its sale in 2021.

Augusto Wolf (also known as August Wolf) studied in Nuremberg and Karlsruhe before settling in Munich in 1869 in the employ of Count Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack, a collector of works by contemporary German painters and copies of Italian and Flemish Old Masters. Von Schack sent Wolf to Venice in 1871 to copy old masters and Wolf duly made no fewer than 48 copies during the 11 years he spent there. Legend holds that this monumental work (so obviously inspired by Veronese's gigantic The Wedding Feast at Cana) was commissioned directly by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, who asked the artist to portray each member of the Imperial family as a noble Venetian. The scene would take place in a luxurious villa in Venice, which the Emperor had rented out for his protégé. It was purchased from the Munich Art Museum at the dawn of WWI by the Ambassador of the United States in Germany. Another similar work entitled Feast on the Island of Murano and executed in 1880 was commissioned directly to the artist by Count Schack, now in the Sammlung Schack, Munich.