Früchtestillleben (Still Life with Fruit), ca. 1903

By the time she moved to Frankfurt in 1891 Ottilie Roederstein was already firmly established as an artist and had exhibited her works to great acclaim not only in her native Zurich but also at the 1888 International Art Exhibition in Munich and in the Swiss section of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, where she was awarded the silver medal. That her choice of a new domicile fell on Frankfurt had to do with her life partner, Elisabeth Winterhalter,¹ for whom the city offered the prospect of becoming the first woman to open a gynaecological practice there.² Soon after her arrival, Roederstein approached our gallery to discuss how she might best get a foothold as an artist in Frankfurt. Gottfried Andreas advised her to paint portraits of prominent society figures and wasted no time in commissioning her to paint a portrait of his wife, Auguste Andreas.³ Through our good offices Roederstein was to receive many more such portrait commissions from leading Frankfurters in subsequent years. That first encounter thus marked the beginning of a fruitful collaboration that was to culminate in a solo show in 1897 and another joint exhibition with Jakob Nussbaum⁴ held at our gallery in 1913.

Still lifes are very much a rarity in Roederstein’s oeuvre of the late nineteenth century. Only after the turn of the century when she deepened her engagement with French Impressionism can a steady increase in this genre, starting in 1903, be observed. Eventually she would become so fond of it that it accounts for more of her total output than any other genre except portraiture.⁵ Also clearly visible here is the influence of Henri Fantin-Latour,⁶ as a comparison with his Stillleben mit Birnen und Kasserolle (Still Life with Pears and Casserole) of 1903 reveals.⁷ In the work under discussion here, however, Roederstein goes a step further and experiments with the changes of colour brought about by the absorption of light and the impact this has on our spatial apprehension of objects and the shift in perspective thus necessitated. This manner of painting, on which the stamp of Paul Cézanne is clearly apparent,⁸ occupies a special place in Roederstein’s oeuvre and would not recur until her Stillleben mit Krug, Birnen und Äpfeln⁹ (Still Life with Jug, Pears and Apples) of 1917, by which time she was developing a much flatter style.