Going to church in Skutari 1916

For picture description see below.

JQAW# G_1914_040
Oil on canvas 32 x 65 cm
Signature: J.Q. Ɑdams IV. 16. Skutari
Private collection, Austria
Illustration: Private photograph

Street scene in a small Albanian town (Skutari). Foreground: sunlit street, behind it a church with three gates, the middle one half open. The church facade is divided by pilasters with capitals, next to the right side gate there is a semicircular window. On the street, striving towards the church entrance several groups of people, which are represented only schematically.

This strongly expressionistic sketch probably represents the entrance to St. Stephen's Cathedral (completed in 1865) in Skutari (Shkodra, Alabania), where in April 1916 Adams made numerous (at least 8 are attested) paintings in a strongly expressionistic style and in vivid colors, significantly deviating from his earlier genre paintings and representing a new modern style, summarized here as the "Skutari period".

The painting was shown in the Adams Collective Exhibition in 1917 (according to the Künstlerhaus archive from the collection of Dr. Josef Weese, Vienna), then was lost until the 1975 auction at the Dorotheum Vienna. Since then in a private collection in Austria.

Cross-references

Paintings from the Skutari period:

Going to church (this work).
Lead-roof mosque (lost).
Cattle market (lost, LOST ART!!).
Blacksmith shop (lost).
Children in factory.
Mother and child.
Noble Albanian woman (lost).
Albanian spy (lost).

Exhibited

1917 Künstlerhaus Vienna Collective Exhibition John Quincy Adams No. 53 (EL 61 1916/17 #529).

Literature

APH, catalog raisonné JQA 1995, 1995, p. 149, cat.#117, fig. 84.

Provenance

1916 from the artist to Dr. Weese, Vienna.
Unknown.
1975 Dorotheum Vienna auction 13./15.5.1975 lot 231.
Private collection Austria.