'Young Love', oil on canvas painting by Schweninger

This charming oil painting depicts a young couple within a garden setting. A beautiful woman stands before a stone wall, wearing a diaphanous white dress, which has fallen off her shoulder to reveal her left breast. She adopts a classical contrapposto pose, and rests her head in the crook of her right arm. A man stands behind her, on the other side of the wall. He holds her left wrist in his hand, and leans his face in towards hers. Wild flowers bloom in the space around the couple.

'C. Schweninger' is signed on the lower left corner of the canvas. Karl Schweninger the Younger, was an accomplished late 19th-Century artist, who trained under his father, the landscape painter, Karl Schweninger the Elder. He then joined the Academy of Fine Arts, first in Vienna and later in Munich. Schweninger the Younger was famous for his Rococo style paintings, which include sensuous female nudes, delightful images of courtship, and playful, freely-painted genre scenes.

The painting is displayed in a finely carved giltwood frame, featuring repeated ovolo motifs and scrolled acanthus leaves. On the reverse of the stretcher, a label reads ‘Karl Schweninger/ Wien 1854-1903/ Junger Liebes/ kuss’.

Frame: Height 135cm, width 80cm, depth 9cm
Canvas: Height 100cm, width 45.5cm