PAUL GUSTAV FISCHER 1860-1934 Copenhague, Dinamarca

Paul Gustave, Gustaf or Gustav Fischer (Copenhagen, July 22, 1860-Gentofte, January 5, 1934) was a realist painter with a certain impressionist air, a Danish illustrator and poster artist belonging to an upper-middle-class Jewish family who three generations ago it had arrived in the country from Poland,1 stylistically incardinable in the context of Scandinavian painting of the last third of the 19th century and first of the 20th century, represented by authors such as his compatriots Carl Vilhelm Holsøe, Peder Mørk Mønsted or Laurits Tuxen or the Swedes Carl Larsson (with whom he maintained a certain friendship) or Anders Zorn among others. Influences, themes and style Of the bulk of his artistic production, a series of portraits and urban landscapes stand out from the numerous European cities in which he worked throughout his life (especially his native country, Norway, Paris [where he lived intermittently from 1891 to 1895 ],1 Germany [1883-1909], Italy [1894-1922],1 etc.), the illustration of children's books and magazines such as the one titled Ude og Hjemme (1882), the design of posters in the line of artists such as the Swiss Théophile Steinlen or the Frenchman Toulouse-Lautrec,1 as well as an extensive gallery of luminous beach scenes in which couples or small groups of young people are generally represented bathing or sunbathing, most of the time completely naked, inspired in the traditional tendency to view nakedness naturally in the Nordic countries, although there are some compositions in which the female protagonists appear dressed in the sober striped swimsuits typical of the first three decades of the 20th century. Chromatically, the study of his painting reveals a gradual evolution (these are not stagnant periods) from the initial predominance of a set of urban scenes with dim lights and austere colors executed with earthy, grayish and sienna colors typical of the first phase of the artist to a series of compositions with a markedly vitalist tone from a second stage characterized by a greater chromatic nuance and a technique of short and parallel touches, expressed with a colorful and luminous language, with memories of the French impressionists, which he must have known from a progressive way from his stays in the French capital