The Blue Lake Karl O’Lynch von Town

The painter’s Irish ancestor emigrated in the late seventeenth century after his participation on the losing side of the Jacobite War in Ireland. Karl O’Lynch von Town began to study drawing in Graz and later trained at the Academies of Fine Arts in Vienna and Munich. He worked mainly in Munich, where he was in contact with the circle of Emil Jakob Schindler, but also exhibited regularly in Graz and Vienna. Between 1904 and 1906 he was a member of the Hagenbund group, which brought together local progressive artists in the years following the internal conflicts of the Vienna Secession. O’Lynch travelled regularly in Europe, and wherever he went, whether to the southern beaches or the cliffs of the Alps, he practised landscape painting, his favourite genre. From the very beggining of his career, his paintings were influenced by symbolism. His perception of the landscape is characterised by an accentuation of athmospheric effects, reinforced by a synthesising articulation of formal elements and the use of pure and intense colours.

Ferenc Tóth