Evening (Seated Old Woman in an Interior)

Evening (Seated Old Woman in an Interior) from 1897 represents one of Schikaneder's most intimate figure studies, combining his atmospheric approach to artificial light with a subject drawn from the everyday life of Prague's older residents. The late 1890s were a productive and increasingly confident period for him: he was in his early forties, his atmospheric nocturnal manner was established, and he was applying it to a widening range of subjects and settings. An elderly woman seated alone in the evening — presumably in a modest interior, lamp burning nearby — embodied the themes of solitude and time that preoccupied him throughout his career. The subject recalls both the Realist tradition of dignified genre portraiture and the Symbolist interest in figures at the boundary between consciousness and withdrawal. Schikaneder was careful never to condescend toward working-class or elderly subjects: his figures inhabit their environments with a quiet self-possession that refuses pathos or sentimentality. The National Gallery Prague's holding of this canvas speaks to how fully his contemporaries recognized the seriousness of his figure work alongside the celebrated street scenes.

The interior lamp light — directed from a specific source onto the figure — allowed Schikaneder to create warm illuminated passages against a cool, relatively dark background, a chiaroscuro arrangement he handled with considerable subtlety. The figure's face and hands, as focal points, receive slightly more resolved brushwork than the ambient surroundings.