Two Maidens by a Stream after Narcissus Diaz de La Pena Original l Oil on Linen Idyllic painting of two girls walking along a path towards a stream in the Barbizon style of Narcisse Diaz de la Peña by Klaus Richter (German, 1888 - 1948). Image, 24:H x 19.5"W Frame, 30"H x 26"W x 2"D Signed K. Richter lower left and on Verso, with a gallery tag lower center. Richter studied philosophy and languages in Milan and Munich, before turning to painting. He trained in anatomical drawing with his uncle Robert Richter in Paris. Subsequently, he became a pupil of Lovis Corinth in Berlin. In 1911, he shared a studio with Magnus Zeller, and exhibited at the Berlin Secession. He also worked as a writer, actor and set designer. In 1919, he took a teaching position at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Starting from 1922, he was a professor at the Art Academy Königsberg, and from 1927, at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. Klaus Richter was a Chairman of the Verein Berliner Künstler. Rudi Lesser was one of his students. Narcisse Diaz de la Peña: was born in 1808 in Bordeaux, of Spanish parents who had fled the Peninsular Wars. After their early deaths, he grew up in foster care at Meudon. At thirteen, an infection, caused by an insect sting or snake bite, necessitated the amputation of his left leg. In 1823 he began an apprenticeship in painting on porcelain at a china factory in Paris, where he met Jules Dupré (1811-1889), who was to become his lifelong friend. Tired of industrial work, Diaz embarked in the late 1820s on a course of independent study, was briefly tutored by the history painter François Souchon (1787-1857), copied the masters at the Louvre, and supported himself by the sale of small pictures of his own invention. The poetry of Victor Hugo and the painting of Delacroix roused him to enthusiastic emulation. His own early work consisted of pastiches of romantic "fancy pictures"--odalisques, bathers, erotic mythologies, sentimental idylls. Gifted with an abundant, dangerously effortless facility, he supplied the art market with agreeable subjects in styles variously indebted to Correggio, Watteau, and Prud'hon, and had no difficulty in entering his paintings in the Paris Salons of the 1830s and 1840s.