Avgusta Šantel (1876–1968) - Cvetlice (Flowers)
Avgusta Šantel (1876–1968) was a Slovenian painter, teacher and printmaker. She was born in 1876 in Gorizia to a painter and art teacher Avgusta Aigentler Šantel and a maths and physics teacher Anton Šantel. Her first art teacher was her mother. In 1891, after attended primary school in Gorizia, she entered the teacher-training college, graduating in 1895. She was also taking violin lessons. In 1896 she got a job as a teacher at the first Slovenian school in Gorizia. In 1898 she passed the examination to teach at middle schools. In 1900 she spent a semester in Vienna at the Kunstschule für Frauen und Mädchen, where her professor was the Austrian painter Tina Blau. While studying there she created the first Slovenian artistic postcard for print. After returning from Vienna she worked as middle-school teacher in different places in Slovenia and Croatia, apart from short interruptions, until her retirement in 1933. In 1907 and 1908 she studied in Munich at a school of applied and fine arts; she attended an evening life-drawing course with the German painter Wilhelm von Debschitz and refined her flower still-life painting at the private school of the Austrian painter Margarete Stall. She was also very active in music, playing and teaching violin. Throughout all her life she was also involved in art. She worked in oil, watercolor, pastel, and colored pencil; she also tried woodcut and linocut. She drew lace patterns as well. Her subjects were mainly landscapes and views of the places where she lived, and flower still lifes. Her woodcuts mostly depict landscapes. She died in 1968 in Ljubljana.
This watercolor is in the collection of Maribor Art Gallery (Umetnostna galerija Maribor).