.
Carl Spitzweg
5th February 1808 – 23th September 1885
Carl Spitzweg was born on 5th of February in 1808 in Unterpfaffenhofen, Bavaria. Although trained as a chemist, he discovered quite early his talent for drawing and his affinity with art. Spitzweg travelled extensively during his lifetime and the impressions formed by his travels greatly influenced his work. Shortly after completing his studies in pharmaceutics in 1832, he visited Italy. It was particularly in the cities of Florence, Rome, and Naples that he discovered the many significant works of Western culture which were to leave a permanent imprint on him.
A severe case of dysentery in 1833 strengthened his resolve to abandon his career as a chemist and he proceeded to commit himself solely to his painting. In June 1835, he became a member of the Munich Art Association and travelled that same year to southern Tirol with the landscape painter Eduard Schleich, the Elder.
In 1839 he completed his first painting entitled ''The Poor Poet'. Although this recurring motif would later be considered his most well-known body of work, the painting was not accepted at this time by the jury of the Munich Art Association.
As regards his graphic production, the first publication in 1844 of his own illustrations in the Munich weekly paper 'Fliegende Blätter' is considered quite significant. His visits to the Industrial Exposition in Paris and the World's Fair exhibition in London in 1851 were his first contact with the Oriental scenes which would begin to inform his work.
To the deserving painter were bestowed numerous honours during the second half of Spitzweg's lifetime: in 1865 the Bavarian Royal Merit Order of St. Michael was conferred upon him, and in 1875 he was named an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Carl Spitzweg died on 23th of September in 1885 and was entombed in the historic South Cemetery in Munich.
He leaves behind a body of work dedicated to the townspeople who inhibit his genre scenes, and with acute and pointed, but never ill-natured humour he portrays the everday bourgeois life of his time.
Lit: Siegfried Wichmann, Carl Spitzweg. Verzeichnis der Werke, Gemälde und Aquarelle, Stuttgart: Belser, 2002.
Carl Spitzweg
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3265
Winterauktionen 19.–20.11.2021
Kauffmann, Hugo Wilhelm
1844 Hamburg - 1915 Prien a. Chiemsee.
«Jäger und Mädel (hunter and girl)». A Bavarian lad and a charming dairymaid in a rustic farmhouse parlour.
Oil on panel. Signed lower right. Verso a fragmentary printed label with the data of the work and the artist. Verso on the back of the frame numbered «3000», on a label inscribed probably by a different hand «Hugo Kauffman» as well as on a printed label numbered «82».
H 23,7,
In a rustic, homely parlour with vivid attributes of rustic cosiness, such as a dark green glazed tiled stove and a window with bull's-eye glass panes, a hearty hunter's lad is courting the favours of a handsome girl. The young woman has treated her admirer to a fresh beer, which is already half empty. The brash youth places his left hand on her forearm, a gesture that makes her recoil in surprise and freeze in demure terror. At the same time, she fixes him with an interested, scrutinising gaze. It is a delicate moment of ambiguity: how will events unfold? Will she reject his desire or will the two of them start an affair?
This genre scene, which is exemplary for Kauffmann's œuvre, not only shows an interior of archetypal Alpine cosiness, but also an interpersonal encounter of intimate vulnerability and subtly unspoken, folkloristically sugar-coated eroticism. The unresolved tension of this discreet, cozy encounter, supported by Kauffmann's typical narrative quality, captivates the voyeuristic interest of the observing eye and testifies equally to an intensive study of the local area and to an in-depth psychologising inclination of this painter.
Provenance: private collection Munich.
Catalogue raisonné: Holz 866.
Condition report 