de Gubernatis, Dizionario degli artisti italiani viventi (1889)
She lived years in Rome, exhibited there, and is buried there, so Italy is her second country after Germany — and the Italian record of her is older than the English one. This entry, in the standard dictionary of living Italian artists, is the source from which she still circulates in the Italian art trade today, copied forward for well over a century.
Where to find it
Angelo de Gubernatis, Dizionario degli artisti italiani viventi: pittori, scultori e architetti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1889), p. 390.
The text
The English is this project's own AI-assisted translation from the Italian, with no human verification against the original.
Preuschen (Erminia) pittrice residente a Roma, valente esecutrice di quadri rappresentanti Frutta e Fiori. Abbiamo ammirato eccellenti quadri di rose, di garofani e di frutta di ogni genere.
A Roma, nel 1883, aveva esposto un quadro dal titolo: Risposta, rappresentante cardoni, un altro portante il titolo: In autunno, riproducente frutta diverse, ed un altro intitolato: Dimanda, eccellente studio di garofani.
A Torino, nel 1884, aveva dei buoni quadri, e ricordiamo pure un'altra tela di questa artista, di bella e spigliata esecuzione, dal titolo: Evoè, Bacche!
At Turin, in 1884, she had good pictures, and we also recall another canvas by this artist, of fine and spirited execution, titled Evoè, Bacche!5
Notes
Identifications, period context, and points where the original carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the source.
- ↑Preuschen (Erminia) — Italian sources Italianise her first name. Searching "Hermione" or "Hermine" in Italian catalogues finds nothing; Erminia is the form that works, and it is why the Italian record went unnoticed here for so long.
- ↑a painter resident in Rome — The dictionary is of living Italian artists — and she is in it. She counted as a Rome painter, flagged only by "(Germania)" in the exhibition catalogues. Despite that, she was left out of Roma Pittrice, the 2024–25 Museo di Roma survey of fifty-six women who worked in Rome: the rediscovery under way in Berlin has not reached Italy at all.
- ↑titled Answer — Risposta and Dimanda — Answer and Question — are plainly a pair. A small conceptual joke staged across two still lifes, and the kind of thing that disappears when only one of the two titles survives in the literature. Both were hung in Sala XIII of the 1883 Rome exhibition, under the country heading (Germania).
- ↑an excellent study of carnations — Dimanda is an older form of domanda, "question." The 1883 official catalogue lists the three works at pp. 73 and 74: cardoons, fruit, and carnations. It has a fourth at p. 90, in Sala XVIII: Evoè, Bacche!, the canvas the next sentence remembers.
- ↑titled Evoè, Bacche! — The Bacchic cry — "Evoe, Bacchus!" Not a Turin picture. The sentence moves from Turin to a canvas the writer remembers, and the Turin catalogue of 1884 lists only one work of hers, Frutta e tigre ("Fruit and Tiger", no. 1459 bis). Evoè, Bacche! hung at Rome in 1883 (official catalogue, no. 21, Sala XVIII). Nor was it obscure: it was in Berlin by January 1881 (Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 6 January 1881) and in Düsseldorf that February (Rhein- und Ruhrzeitung, 16 February 1881), and Rilke praised it in 1896 as decoratively significant. No record we hold shows where the canvas is now. (Rilke on Preuschen, 1896)