In 1908, Mützner was working in Giverny, where the elderly Claude Monet was passing on his experience as an impressionist painter to younger artists. Under Monet’s influence, Mützner studied carefully one and the same spot so as to understand the changing effects of light on colour and atmosphere depending on time of day, weather or season and render them on canvas.
As the sun rises, a thin blanket of mist filters the light: the morning landscape emerges dominated by cold hues of green, violet, and blue.
At sunset, a rich array of yellow, orange and pink lend the same landscape a radiant, warm quality.
Inspired by Monet, free from the purist approach of pointillism or divisionism as practiced by Seurat and explained by Signac, Mützner employs both pure and mixed colours. In short, vibrant brush strokes, he depicts the rich layering of light and shadow, his landscapes striking a deeply lyrical vein.
