From the 1910s onward, Edward Cucuel's work was characterized by cheerful, carefree open-air painting, which he initially pursued with his friend and teacher Leo Putz in Hartmannsberg am Chiemsee, where the painters worked side by side every summer for four years. Prior to this, he worked mainly as a graphic artist and illustrator for the press, such as in New York in the 1890s, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in his native city of San Francisco and at the progressive Académie Julian in Paris. From 1914, Cucuel lived on Lake Ammersee and then on Lake Starnberg south of Munich, where he owned a villa with an extensive lakeside garden. He continued the motif he had previously chosen: young, elegantly dressed ladies, casually draped and enjoying their leisure time in the countryside. Becoming more independent in style from Putz, Cucuel captured his pictures with an unbroken fluid to fleeting brushstroke in rich colors of high luminosity. The special appeal of Edward Cucuel's paintings lies in their palpable lightness and nonchalant elegance. The staging of the models blurs the boundary between pose and unobserved spontaneity; in the relaxed execution, painting appears to be a pleasant summer pastime. He often not only uses a brush, but also applies the paint in broad strokes with a painting knife, giving his motifs a solid physicality despite the bright, pastel colors. In particular, the world of the beautiful, carefree young woman in a summer landscape is one of Edward Cucuel's most successful motifs. His pictures of the shores of Lake Starnberg and the park belonging to the villa, as well as the small, light-filled woods in the surrounding countryside, are an expression of an attitude to life that is also characteristic of a certain social class, to which the painter paid homage in his late Impressionist-influenced style of painting. Iridescent reflections of light on the white clothing of the ladies, here against the intense green of the branches and the ground illuminated by individual patches of sunlight, give the scene that enraptured magic that is so characteristic of many of Cucuel's works from this period. [KT]