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Signed 'H. Purrmann' in blue lower left. Hans Purrmann developed the foundations of his painting style during his first ten years in Paris, before the First World War, where he was friends with Fauves such as Henri Matisse and worked together with him and with other German artists of the Café du Dôme at the Académie Matisse. In the decades that followed, international political developments led him to relocate his home multiple times between different countries. Thus, during the Nazi period - when his works were considered 'degenerate' in Germany - he headed the Künstlerstiftung Villa Romana in Florence, before finally fleeing to Ticino in 1943. In the 1950s and 1960s travels and important exhibitions followed, for example, his participation in the first Documenta. He worked a great deal in southern Italy: in Sorrento and on Ischia he created still lifes, portraits and landscape paintings in the splendid colours familiar from his work. From 1962 to 1965, Purrmann - who had since been confined to a wheelchair - spent the summer months in Levanto, near La Spezia, on the Ligurian coast (see comp. illus.). He lived in the Villa Le Lagore, situated in the green hills of the Cinque Terre above the Italian Riviera, where he was able to use the house's private chapel as his studio. He painted the surrounding area in the open air. A series of related motifs emerged, in which no two are alike, but in which a small detail of his reality is intensively explored and captured in all of its aspects. The green garden bench, as is also to be seen in our painting, proved almost iconic within the series that was created there. The powerfully luminous tones of green and blue in the trees intensify one another in their complementary contrast to the terracotta orange of the fountain and the flower pots. The curves of the spherical crowns of the trees visualise, so to speak, the bursting fertility of the southern vegetation. Almost in the middle, in front of the little garden wall and half covered in shadow, the green bench practically beckons the viewer to take a settle down within this idyll. The paintings created in Levanto at the Villa Le Lagore present the conclusion of Purrmann's life's work, and they unite within themselves both his abilities as a painter and a record of his great love for the light and colours of Italy. 51 x 60 cm