From My Hothouse
Flowering branches with dark leaves and berries fill the upper half; below them white narcissus and heavy blossom crowd forward out of a dark ground, with reed-like leaves rising between. The format is extreme — tall and very narrow — and the picture is built to fill it from top to bottom.
It was shown at the XX. Jahresausstellung of the Vienna Künstlerhaus in 1891, and the Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik had it engraved by J. Blechinger for its issue of that spring. The caption reads simply “Aus meinem Treibhause”. Von Hermine von Preuschen. Aus der Jahresausstellung im Künstlerhause — “From My Hothouse. By Hermine von Preuschen. From the annual exhibition at the Künstlerhaus.”
The painting is untraced, and this plate is the only image of it.
The full title of the group it belongs to is Aus meinem Treibhause in Nizza — “from my hothouse in Nice” — which places it with the Ma serre, Nice and Yucca and Cacti panels: the cycle of tall decorative “windows to the South” she painted from the plants of the French Riviera. Seen beside them, this is the same enterprise in a narrower frame. The group was under way at Nice in January 1890, when she was at work on five tall panels to be called Aus meinem Treibhaus (Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 1 February 1890), and a picture under that title was newly on show at the Munich Kunstverein by 15 July 1890 (Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 July 1890).