Boy with sweets

Kirchner's painting Boy with Sweets (1918) is a highlight of the Expressionism Collection of the Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Oldenburg. The painting was first acquired by the Museum in 1930, confiscated by the Nazis in 1937 and re-acquired by the Museum only in 2007. Kirchner, suffering psychologically and physically from the events of the First World War, retired to Davos in the Swiss mountains, and it was there that he created the painting.
The subject of the enigmatic boy placed in the glistening mountain landscape oscillates between the “dawn of men” (“Menschheitsdämmerung”) of expressionist art and the experience of the Swiss Alps which revived Kirchner’s courage to live and paint.