Carl Spitzweg and Marc Chagall: Romantic Fiddlers

These days I was truly relishing in my ever-growing love of violin music, mostly through the sound of the British chamber pop band Tindersticks and their melancholy and wistful nineties songs woven with passion and yearning, but also through the compositions by the classical composers as well. A fiddler (or a violinist) is a very recognisable motif in the art of Marc Chagall and it often appears in his art over the years and decades. With my love of violins and Chagall’s art, I was delighted to see the motif of a violinist in a painting by a German painter Carl Spitzweg. These two paintings are very different, and I thought it would be fun to compare the different executions of the same motif.

Carl Spitzweg, The Serenade, 1854

Carl Spitzweg is a very underrated painter in my opinion because he painted a plethora of delightful genre scenes which deserve to be further explored. His art is not a flashy, sensational, provocative kind, but rather the kind which grows more beautiful the longer you gaze at it. “The Serenade”, painted in 1854, is one such genre painting. It shows a man climbing the ladder, I will assume, to the window of the woman he loves to play her a serenade, to seduce her and make her sigh with delight. He is seen from the profile, we can barely see his face, he is an anonymous, mysteries character; a romantic and a dreamer, caught in his act of romance by the painter’s artistic eye, but at the same time he is a plain, average man; he isn’t a knight in shining armour or a strong, young hero of a maiden’s dream. The somewhat monotonous colour palette may appear boring at first, but it is somehow very fitting. Brick wall and old roof tiles don’t particularly create a romantic stage for this serenade, but I think his humble simplicity only adds to the romance of the scene in some strange way because life isn’t always a perfect fairy tale, but it can have its magical moments. This fiddler may be an average Joe, but to a woman he is serenading he’s a maverick. Spitzweg always paints everyday people and manages to bring out their eccentric and quirky sides.

Chagall’s “Blue Fiddler” painted in 1947, almost a century after Spitzweg’s fiddler, is more red than blue; his face is red as poppies and roses and crimson hued as the love that the sound of his music must be creating. His wild hair and large eyes look poetic make him look mystical and dreamy, as if he were a nocturnal creature from some other world, fiddling away every night under the light of the moon. Chagall’s fiddler isn’t a man from a poor, shabby suburb but rather lives entirely in a surreal, magical, dreamy world of his own. Enveloped with the blue cloak of the night, above the sleeping blue houses, in the company of birds and a bouquet of flowers, this fiddler is a mystical, ethereal creature; he isn’t serenading his beloved, his is serenading the world with his violin lullabies. Chagall’s fiddler is universal and dreamy, and Spitzweg’s fiddler is a local eccentric, but both can make us ponder on the magic, seductive nature of music and the effect it can have on the listeners. Music, and art too, are a loving embrace that shield us from the world.

Marc Chagall, The Blue Fiddler, 1947