Timeline

Born in Hungary, Adolf Hirschl was raised in Vienna, where in 1878 he obtained a scholarship to the Akademie der bildenden Künste. In 1880 his first major canvas, Farewell: Scene from Hannibal Crossing the Alps, won a prize for historical painting. This was followed two years later by a second prize that allowed him to visit Rome, where he lived until 1884. His experiences in Rome were to have a profound effect on his work, notably in his preference for scenes from ancient Roman history. On his return to Vienna Hirschl exhibited a large canvas of The Plague in Rome, painted in 1884, to considerable acclaim. He soon established a successful career as a painter, receiving numerous commissions and producing grand, complex compositions of historical or allegorical subjects that were widely praised by critics and connoisseurs. Hirschl’s paintings were exhibited throughout Europe, and the artist reached the peak of his Viennese career when he won the Imperial Prize in 1891. Despite his status as one of the most successful artists in fin-de-siècle Vienna, however, as the turn of the century approached his work began to be overshadowed by the more progressive and radical paintings of Gustav Klimt and the artists of the Vienna Secession movement. Around 1900 he adopted the Hungarian name Hirémy and moved to Rome, where he spent the last thirty-five years of his career, and where a retrospective exhibition of seventy of his works was held in 1904. An eminent member of the expatriate artistic community in Rome, Hirémy-Hirschl was admitted into the Accademia di San Luca in 1911. He remained largely immune to the latest avant-garde trends in art, both in Vienna and in Rome, preferring to work in his own distinctive manner. Unfortunately, a number of the artist’s important history paintings are lost, notably The Plague in Rome of 1884. One of his last large-scale canvases was the huge polyptych Sic Transit..., a vast allegory of the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Christian era, completed in 1912 and exhibited in Vienna the following year.

A remarkably accomplished draughtsman, Hirémy-Hirschl produced a large number of figure and drapery studies in charcoal or chalk, intended as preparatory studies for his paintings, as well as a number of autonomous landscape studies in pastel, watercolour and gouache. His studies of female nudes in particular have a directness and overt sexuality that is often mirrored in his paintings. In the studies for such large, multi-figural paintings as the Souls on the Banks of the Acheron and Sic Transit…, Hirémy-Hirschl frequently made use of blue, orange or lavender paper, enhancing the play of light over the drawn form.The contents of Hirémy-Hirschl’s Roman studio remained in the possession of the artist’s descendants for many years after his death, and the large cache of drawings, watercolours, pastels and oil sketches was only dispersed in the early 1980’s. Of Hirémy-Hirschl as a draughtsman, one modern scholar has written that ‘A great passion for artistic creation is evident in the drawings, the sustained attempt to perfect the single part at the same time his means of escape from completion and synthesis, while another has noted of drawings such as those here exhibited that ‘these figure and drapery studies charm by their effective fragmentation, by the interplay between black and white chalk and colored paper, by their unmistakable period flavor.'