Karl Hagedorn:
Rhythmical Expression: Full-length Female Nude, c. 1913
Framed (ref: 11137)
Oil on canvas

Tags: Karl Hagedorn oil portraits women 1.PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

Provenance: Private Collection since circa 1950; thence by descent

Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.102.

In a frame of the artist's own design.

In 1910, Hagedorn studied at the Manchester School of Art under the French Impressionist painter Pierre Adolphe Valette, before heading to Paris in 1912 alongside fellow student, Francis Sladen-Smith. While in Paris, Hagedorn worked in the atelier of Maurice Denis, exhibited at the Société du Salon d'automne, and met with Henri Matisse in his studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where he would have observed the melodious, energetic works undertaken by the artist for his patron, Sergei Shchukin. 

Hagedorn returned to England in the early part of 1913, and in the ensuing months, he set about absorbing and reinterpreting these lessons, producing the works he would display at the second exhibition of Manchester’s Society of Modern Painters. These ‘rhythmical expressions’, as he called them, were to be some of the boldest and most singular examples of Post-Impressionism ever exhibited in Britain.