Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl

Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl (1860–1933) was a Hungarian, Jewish artist[1] known for historical and mythological painting, particularly of subjects pertaining to ancient Rome.

He enjoyed a successful career with numerous commissions and high praise for his historical and allegorical works, culminating in the Imperial Prize in 1891.

During the rise of Klimt and the Vienna Secession movement, he began using the name Adolf Hirémy and moved to Rome, where he spent the last 35 years of his life as an eminent member of the expatriate art community.

His studies for Souls on the Banks of the Acheron and Sic Transit … were often executed on blue, lavender, or orange paper that enhanced the play of light in relation to the forms he drew.

Fragmentation is characteristic of his drawings, "the sustained attempt to perfect the single part" which at the same time represented a "means of escape from completion and synthesis".

[4] Ahasuerus at the End of the World (1888) is executed in a restricted palette of blue, gray, black, white, with touches of gold and lingering warmth in the flesh of the foregrounded female nude.