WALCHENSEE OR KOCHELSEE?

Walchensee Landscape, 51 x 61 cm watercolor and gouache by Lovis Corinth

Kochelsee in the Rain, 12 x 16 inch watercolor and gouache by George C. Clark    AVAILABLE

I was looking at pictures in my catalog from the big Lovis Corinth exhibition that appeared in museums in Munich, Berlin, Saint Louis and London in 1996-7 when I noticed something that hadn't registered with me on many earlier studies of that book.  On page 355 a watercolor landscape is reproduced that was signed by Corinth, inscribed "Walchensee," and dated August 1924.  However, I am almost certain that the lake depicted is not in fact the Walchensee but the nearby Kochelsee.   And the reason I know this is because I painted that same lake from almost the same point of view on a visit to Germany some years ago.

We had flown into Munich and rented a car to explore southern Germany.  We visited a couple of Mad King Ludwig's castles and then headed for what I considered Corinth Country.  Corinth has been a favorite painter of mine since I discovered his work in a wonderful big book edited by his widow that I found in the art books department of Kroch's and Brentano's while I was in art school in the 1960s.  That book cost $180.  There was no way I could afford to buy it, but I spent a lot of time looking at it in the store.  The man who ran the art department was very tolerant of poor art students.  I think he suspected that some day I would be an art book collector and a good customer.  Thank you, Henry.  In 1998 the U.S. Air Force Art Program flew me to Frankfurt to attend the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Air Lift and I found a new reprint edition of Charlotte Berend-Corinth's 1958 book Lovis Corinth that I bought.  

Toward the end of World War I Corinth started spending his summers in the alpine lakes region of southern Bavaria.  In 1919 he built a house in the village of Urfeld on the shore of the Walchensee and spent increasing amounts of time there each year until his death in 1925.  His "Walchensee" paintings proved very popular with collectors and he painted a lot of them, some from his own property overlooking the lake, and some from other vantage points in the area.  I based myself in the larger town of Rottach-Egern nearby and spent a full day poking around the places Corinth lived and worked.   I drove around the lakes and explored the little lakeside villages.   It was raining when I pulled off the road at a scenic overlook and painted the watercolor posted above.  I sat in the passenger seat of my rented Volkswagen Golf with my watercolor block on my lap and the paints on the open door of the glove compartment.  I had no idea at the time that my painting idol had painted almost the same view decades earlier, although on a sunny day.  

Why did he inscribe his painting Walchensee and not Kochelsee?  I figure he either forgot which exact body of water he had depicted when he was signing his work perhaps weeks later, or he was using Walchensee as a blanket description for all the locations he painted while living at his house on that lake.  That view overlooking Kochelsee is only about 3 kilometers from his house, after all.