Alexander Koester is best known for his varied portrayals of ducks. Showing these works at art exhibitions in Germany from 1899 onwards, they became his most successful motif. However, his oeuvre also spans all other painting disciplines, from portrait and genre to landscape and still life. It is in these works that his broad impasto style of painting, which positively luxuriates in the color medium, came into its own. His style holds a special allure of materiality in which the color medium virtually remodels the portrayed flowers, vases, cloths or surfaces. He thus created vivid, almost haptic surfaces full of sparkle, reflections, effects, light reflexes and transparencies that reveal the essentially Impressionistic principle underlying his painting style, namely to capture the changing effects of light on the canvas and turn them into a visual experience. [KT]