(Linz 1910–2001)
Stadt am Fluss im Winter / Town by a river in winter, signed and dated Fritz Fröhlich 1939, oil on wood, 85 x 110 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Upper Austria
in the family since three generations

Compare:
Fritz Fröhlich. Werkverzeichnis I, Citygalerie Linz (ed.), Linz 2000, p. 7: Erwähnung eines Winterbildes “Stadt an der Moldau” von 1939, dessen Verbleib unbekannt ist. / Notice of a winter painting “Stadt an der Moldau” whose whereabouts are unknown.

“The spiritual basis from which my early paintings had grown solidified into the supporting ground during the period of solitude when I worked in the wooden house above the Danube valley. I had developed an independent style of painting. ... I would almost like to call my paintings of 1937 naive art, if the term had not been coined for a completely different direction.”
(Fritz Fröhlich, in: Catalogue raisonné Volume I, Citygalerie Linz (Ed.) Linz 2000)

After studying at the Vienna Academy, Fritz Fröhlich returned to Upper Austria, where he moved into his studio in a small house on the Dürnberg, near Ottensheim above the Danube valley. As early as 1937, he was awarded the State Prize by the Upper Austrian Art Association at his first exhibition. In 1938, a fire destroyed his studio, meaning that only a very small collection from this early phase of his pre-1945 work remains.