Ma serre, Nice
Ma serre, Nice (“My Greenhouse, Nice”, 1890) shows laurel branches and white lilies in a southern conservatory, on a strikingly tall, narrow canvas (200 × 66 cm). Titled, signed, and dated on the canvas, its French title — my greenhouse — points to the source of this whole group of pictures: the exotic vegetation she found wintering on the French Riviera.
It belongs to a cycle of large vertical panels of southern flora — orange branches and azaleas on a seaside terrace, magnolias and rhododendron, yucca and cacti — each 200 × 66 cm, conceived as decorative pendants. Two panels titled Orangen u. Azaleen (“Oranges and Azaleas”) and Magnolien u. Rhododendron (“Magnolias and Rhododendron”) hung at the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1890 and were illustrated in its catalogue (Boetticher, Malerwerke des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1898) — the very exhibition whose jury had turned down Mors Imperator three years earlier. The Dorotheum, which sold two of the panels in 2021, calls the showing a success. None of the reviews of that exhibition in our record names the panels. They were divided over her large Irene von Spilimberg’s Death Gondola and readier to praise the smaller flower pieces she showed beside it: Vienna’s Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik (10 August 1890) found four of them „reizend” (“charming”), and better painting than the gondola. The Riviera’s climate and lush growth drew fashionable Europe at the century’s end, and these shimmering panels were her “windows to the South.”
Known panels of the cycle (all oil on canvas, 200 × 66 cm):
- Ma serre, Nice — laurel branches and white lilies (shown here)
- Yucca und Kakteen — flowering yucca and prickly-pear (in this gallery)
- Blühende Orangenzweige und Azaleen — orange branches and azaleas in a bronze vase, on a seaside terrace (known from the auction record; no public-domain image located)
- Magnolien und Rhododendron — magnolias and rhododendron (auction record; no public-domain image located)
The last two surfaced together at the Dorotheum, Vienna, which grouped the cycle under the title “Fenster zum Süden” (“Window to the South”). Their only images are the auction house’s own, so they can’t yet be shown here — but the cycle is larger than the two panels we can display.
