HERMANN GEHRI (1879-1944)

The Lovers (white rose)

Watercolour on paper, 1921, signed and dated lower left.

A couple of nude figures lies within the open bloom of a white rose, their bodies resting and unfolding with the same quiet rhythm as the flower itself. The petals cradle them like a fragile refuge, turning the flower into an intimate, living space. The rose becomes an allegory of their love — something that opens, grows, and reaches a moment of perfect beauty and tenderness, while already carrying within it a sense of fragility and inevitable decline.

This work belongs to Gehri’s The Lovers series, where human figures and the vegetal world merge into a single poetic language. Here, the couple’s bond is inseparable from the life of the flower: like nature, their love blooms, transforms, and will eventually fade. The image captures a suspended moment, both radiant and ephemeral, where desire and transience coexist.

Painted the year after Gehri was appointed Professor of Figure Drawing at the Badische Landeskunstschule in Karlsruhe, the work captures everything that made him beloved by his students: a luminous palette, a sinuous line, and an unmistakable sense of poetry.

A German painter trained in Dresden and Karlsruhe, with formative travels through Japan, Italy and Paris, Gehri was dismissed from his professorship by the Nazis in 1933 and labelled a “degenerate” artist in 1937. He died in the bombing of Freiburg in November 1944, which destroyed his studio and much of his life’s work.