Ella's Hotel

Otto Bacher (American, 1856-1909) Ellas Hotel, Richfield, Ohio, 188385 Oil on canvas Private collection

The summer after his return to Cleveland from Munich, Bacher founded an art colony in Richfield, where he began almost two years of work on this strikingly composed view from a hotel porch. By juxtaposing intense colors and sharp edges in the landscape with occasionally obscure silhouetted figures on the porch, he evoked a sense of the optical glare created when looking at nature in bright sunlight. Bacher had lived in cities all his life, so it is not surprising that his vision of the slow pace of rural life has an element of nostalgia and romanticism about it.