Even in his younger years, E. L. Kirchner and his fellow "Brücke" artists left the city to paint in the countryside in search of harmony between art and nature, as well as of a simpler life. During the Dresden years, the artist often went to the Moritzburg Ponds, and during the Berlin years between 1911 and 1917, the Baltic island of Fehmarn was one of his favorite retreats. After the end of the First World War, Kirchner and his partner Erna Schilling finally moved to Davos in Switzerland hoping to recover from severe mental and physical illnesses. From 1923, the couple found a permanent home at the 'Wildbodenhaus', where they both lived until the end of their lives (E. L. Kirchner in 1938 and Erna in 1945). From then on, the slow rural pace of life and the Alpine nature not only provided Kirchner with an invigorating peace, enabling him to recover from his illness but also proved to be an important source of inspiration for a long creative period. While the reverse shows a presumably earlier sketch of the sport of 'Skijoring', popular in Switzerland and northern European countries, the front features a detailed landscape scene from Davos.

Kirchner had already portrayed the 'Junkerboden' in a woodcut of the same name in 1919, but this large drawing from the late 1930s also shows the artist enjoying the impressive view of the snow-covered Junkerboden below the Rinerhorn, shortly before he committed suicide in 1938. This view of the Junkerboden shows a lively landscape characterized by zigzagging lines that Kirchner combines with fine details and bold colors to create a dynamic composition. The drawing offered here is directly related to the painting "Junkerboden unter Schnee" (around 1936/1938, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid), which was in Kirchner's studio/apartment at the time of his death. The oil painting resembles our drawing in terms of topography, the arrangement of the houses and trees, the small clearing with huts on the hill in the middle left background, the tracks in the snow running through the foreground, and the color scheme. Even the brightly sunlit snow-covered mountain in the background of the painting is completely unshaded in our depiction and has no internal drawing. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza assumes that the painting is one of the artist's last paintings, as seemingly unfinished areas in the foreground suggest. Kirchner may have wanted to add the figure trudging through the snow in the foreground, as it is suggested in our drawing. This makes the drawing not only an important document of Kirchner's artistic process but also a further testimony to Kirchner's masterly draughtsmanship. [CH]