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On light chamois imitating Japan. One of 4 known impressions by the artist in the first state before the edition. Titled and dated ‘David 19’ in pencil by the artist on the verso as well as with the estate stamp and the inscription ‘H 397 II’ in ink and ‘K9914’ in pencil.
Earlier catalogues raisonnés: Schiefler H 397. There the description by Kirchner and Schiefler:
‘Large head (turned slightly to the side, to the r.); the face narrows to a pointed chin (10 mm from the lower BR). Very pointed nose; the l. eye is as it were squeezed together. Jagged line of a moustache on the upper lip, narrow lips of the closed mouth. The face is modelled with fine and dense light strokes on a dark background. The forehead is framed by the black surface of the hair, which hangs down in a point between the ear and the right temple. Temples. The neck rises steeply from the semicircle of the shirt collar. A cap on the back of the head. On the right and left the roundish balls of clouds become visible.’
Published in the second (third?) state in 110 copies in ‘Bauhaus Drucke, Neue Europäische Graphik, 5. Mappe, Deutsche Künstler’, Weimar 1921.
Further copies in the following collections: Museum Folkwang Essen; Hermann Gerlinger Collection Moritzburg Halle; Kirchner Museum Davos; Bucheim Museum Bernried; Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt; Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Lindenau-Museum Altenburg; Pinacoteca Nazionale Bologna; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Busch-Reisinger Museum Cambridge; Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern; The Metropolitan Museum New York; Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart;
David Müller (born 1892) was one of the four sons of Andreas Müller, who rented Kirchner the ‘Haus in den Lärchen’ in Davos-Frauenkirch in 1918, when he was 27 years old. One of Kirchner’s last such impressive, very nervous, merely ‘torn’, uncut woodcuts from the years of his illness from 1916 to 1919.
