Yucca and Cacti
Yucca und Kakteen (“Yucca and Cacti”, c. 1890), signed Hermine von Preuschen, gives its tall, narrow canvas (200 × 66 cm) to a flowering yucca and prickly-pear cacti — the upward-thrusting shapes perfectly suited to the vertical format.
It is one panel of a cycle of large decorative “windows to the South” that Preuschen painted from the exotic vegetation of the French Riviera (see its companion Ma serre, Nice, “my greenhouse in Nice”). Two panels of the cycle hung at the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1890 — a pointed return to the exhibition whose jury had turned down Mors Imperator in 1887; the Dorotheum, which sold two of the panels in 2021, calls the showing a success. Yucca, agave, and prickly-pear were plants a German painter could only meet in the south, in the conservatories and seaside gardens where fashionable Europe wintered.
