
Peter Rees
Director
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Sold for £32,000 inc. premium
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Director
Provenance
Private collection, UK.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Wilhelm Kuhnert often worked directly from nature taking hours to track down his subjects and then sketching the animals in the wild rather than in zoos. He is best known for his striking pictures of lions and tigers, captured in their natural environment and portrayed in all their majesty. After graduating from Berlin University of the Arts in 1887, Kuhnert travelled widely to Scandanavia, Eygpt, East Africa and India. Kuhnert was an outstanding draughtsman and a prodigiously talented artist, equally at ease with a minutely detailed etching as he was working on a monumental scale such as the present lot. His work is characterised by a blend of rapid execution combined with anatomical accuracy - reputedly he never used an eraser on a single drawing, or made any corrections to any of his 137 etching plates. He died in Switzerland in 1926.