Gebirgssee

Gebirgssee (Mountain Lake), painted in 1886 and now at the Berlinische Galerie, is among Ury's earliest surviving works and shows him before he had settled on the urban nocturne subjects that would define his career. Painted at twenty-eight, this mountain lake subject belongs to a German landscape tradition running from the Romantic era through the Realist work of painters associated with Düsseldorf and Munich, where Ury had studied. The choice of a mountain lake — clear, still, reflective water in an alpine or sub-alpine setting — gave Ury his first sustained engagement with the problem of reflected light in water, a problem he would later address repeatedly in the rain-wet streets of Berlin. The Berlinische Galerie, as the city's museum of modern and contemporary Berlin art, holds this early Ury as a document of the city's artistic heritage even though the painting's subject is geographically distant from Berlin. The transition from this rural landscape practice to his characteristic urban subjects was not immediate — Ury spent time in Brussels and Paris before arriving at the Berlin street motifs — and the mountain lake shows what he was working with before urban life became his defining subject.

The stillness of mountain lake water provides Ury with a perfect reflection surface — the inverted landscape in the lake creates a doubled visual world that tests his ability to transcribe optical complexity. Paint handling at this early stage is more careful than his mature work, with greater attention to surface detail and more conventionally modelled forms. The palette is cool — mountain light and still water producing the blues and greens that dominate alpine lake painting.