The Städel bought the first painting by Ottilie W. Roederstein in 1902.

It was the first work by a contemporary artist for the museum.

The Old Woman Reading, created in the same year, is entirely a conventional style painting, with a touch of Impressionism in it.

Roederstein had just become a member of the "Frankfurt-Cronberger Artists' Association".

This did not make her a fan of plein air painting and certainly not a Secessionist, but stands for her sympathetic interest in artistic developments throughout her life.

Rose Maria Gropp

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The Städel is now showing around eighty paintings and drawings by the artist under the title “Frei.

creating.

The Painter Ottilie W. Roederstein”, who in her time became famous primarily for her portraits.

She was born in Zurich in 1859, the second daughter of her parents from the Rhineland, who had settled there in 1857.

Against her mother's resistance, she fought for her first drawing and painting lessons.

After a period in Berlin, she went to Paris for five years from 1882 to continue her painting training in the women's studios of Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques Henner, which belong to academic realism.

She had surprisingly early success, especially for a woman.

If it only sounds funny today that a French critic would acclaim her as "the manliest talent in this woman's brush",

The portrait of a redhead as a business card

At the Paris World Exhibition, her portrait of "Miss Mosher" was exhibited in the Swiss Pavilion and awarded a silver medal;

today privately owned, it can be viewed in the exhibition.

The full portrait of a red-haired woman in profile, in a black evening dress and in front of a dark red background, in virtuoso salon painting, became a kind of calling card that gave her access to affluent clientele.

In general, the difference between the use of mere manual skills and their eminent possibilities in connection with artistic inspiration and empathy with the subject can be seen in her pictures, without which so much skill must remain stale and lifeless.

This becomes particularly clear when, in the nineties of the nineteenth century, she changed her style towards a phase

in which the Italian and German Renaissance served as models, quite à la mode at the time, by the way.

Accordingly, she now also worked in tempera on wood, creating the finest portraits, including her enchanting "Self-Portrait with a Red Cap" from 1894, now in the Städel, which is otherwise in the Kunstmuseum Basel.

But she also made portraits of children in this style or a very contemporary "Magdalene at the foot of the Cross" with translucent flesh tones.