Carl Spitzweg – The Intercepted Love Letter

Carl Spitzweg, The Intercepted Love Letter, 1855

Carl Spitzweg is a very underrated German painter of Biedermeier period. His canvases are filled with the strangest people; from fiddlers, butterfly hunters and poor poets, to hermits, gnomes and bookworms, it is as if he had an eye for the strange and the eccentric individuals. “The Intercepted Love Letter”, painted in 1855 when Spitzweg was in his late forties, shows a comical romance scene in a picturesque little town. A young student on the second floor is using a thread to lower the sealed love letter to a young maiden on the floor bellow. He reminds me of the student in Oscar Wilde’s tale “The Nightingale and the Rose”, desperately in love with a haughty young girl, prepared to sacrifice everything to have her, only to conclude in the end that love is a miserable lie, and return to science, logic and his studies. This girl bellow doesn’t seem haughty though; she is lost in her needlework, oh the tragedy, and she doesn’t even notice that the letter is arriving her way! But the older woman who is beside her is clearly shocked by what she is seeing before her eyes. She’s probably an old spinster who hasn’t received a love letter in her life, and how could she understand the young student whose heart aches with love? Two pigeons on the roofs are also there to further remind us of the love that is in the air.

Carl Spitzweg, The Garrett, 1849

Spitzweg clearly had a sense of humour and knew how to transfer it into a painting. A Romantic painter would have painted two lovers throwing themselves off of the cliff, or dying from love, but Spitzweg sees the comical side of the situation. In another painting, “The Serenade”, painted in 1854, we see a romantic scene infused with humour again. I wrote about that painting already here. It shows a man climbing up the ladder to play violin to serenade the woman he loves, but he isn’t a young raven-haired Latino lover, he is just an average guy and the setting if far from romantical. Painting “The Garrett” shows a pompous looking old man watering his plants. A young girl on the other window bellow is eyeing him with curiosity. I bet he is the kind of strange eccentric neighbour that everyone has in their street. And I don’t think I really need to point out what is particularly humorous in the painting “The Poor Poet”; everything about that painting is comical. What I am trying to show here is that Carl Spitzweg’s art may appear as “nothing special” at first, it has a humorous touch that makes it stand above the average genre scenes and sentimental Biedermeier paintings.

 

Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet, 1839

Carl Spitzweg, The Serenade, 1854

Portrait of the Artist’s Wife – Konstantin Danil

I stumbled upon this painting somewhere in the hazy depths of Tumblr, and its aura of gentleness, tenderness and lightness immediately attracted me.

Konstantin Danil, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (Portret umetnikove žene), c. 1846

Portrait of the Artist’s Wife by Serbian painter Konstantin Danil remained unfinished. It wasn’t the artist’s death that stopped him from painting his wife’s delicate pale hands, it was probably the sense of completeness, the impression that every succeeding brushstroke would be overindulgence. Danil (1798-1873), was a renowned Serbian painter of the 19th century, born in a family with Serbian and Romanian roots. His father was a Russian officer who eventually settled in Banat (now western Romania). Fate dealt Danil such cards that he travelled too, and his artistic career stretched through different countries. He studied painting in Temișvar, Munich and Vienna, and also travelled throughout Banat and Transylvania, capturing the scenery along the way. Although he painted almost every subject there is to paint, he was most proficient in portraits such as the one above.

In a plain white dress, with bare shoulders, Danil’s wife Sofia Dely, who belonged to the impoverished Hungarian aristocratic family, sits leaned on the arm of the chair, gazing mournfully into the distance. Gathers on her thin white dress are painted beautifully, the dark parts being carefully accentuated with grey and soft pink tones. Technique chiaroscuro (light-dark) gives the sense of volume and emphasises the woman’s lightness against the vast dark background. Her loose white garment, bare shoulders and soft curls are evocative of the seventeenth century portraits by French and English masters, such as one of the portraits of Nell Gwyn.

Still, the focus is on the woman’s face; rosy cheeks, sad light blue eyes, thin lips, soft under chin, and thinning hair that once shone in abundance of golden curls all suggest a withered woman. This, along with a peculiar plaintive glance, gives the portrait a psychological depth; it was painted by someone who knew her well and had been married to her almost twenty years at the time. The vague definition of her right hand gives the portrait its magic. Because of this vagueness everything else looses its distinction, and the figure becomes translucent and decadently delicate. In this portrait, naturalism typical for Biedermeier gave way to truthful romantic sensibility.