Lodewijk Schelfhout artwork • painting • previously for sale A still life with fruit, flowers and a bottle

The painter-graphic artist Lodewijk Schelfhout, grandson of the landscape painter Andreas Schelfhout, is considered the first Dutch cubist. From 1903 to 1913 he lived in Paris where he was in circles of the early cubists and, among others, got to know Henri le Fauconnier and Picasso. In 1921 the painter made many drawings and engravings during a five-month stay in Corsica. In his later career, Schelfhout's style changed under the influence of his predilection for the Renaissance and Gothic. Religion also played an increasingly important role in his work. He developed a synthesis of Gothic, cubism and constructivism, a style that he would continue to use. Little has been preserved of his early, purely cubist paintings and watercolors; he burned most of it in 1924. In the Second World War, his graphic work was housed by his wife Albertine after the bombing of the Euterpestraat in a bank vault and thus completely and in all printstates preserved and now to be admired in the Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam.