A Day in Carl Spitzweg’s Humorous Biedermeier World
As anyone who’s ever lived in a small town will tell you – there’s no avoiding your neighbors there. Or their curiosity. The smaller the town, the more things people know about each other. As annoying as that can be, there was one German painter who saw the humorous side of this situation. Carl Spitzweg was born in 1808 in Bavaria. Although Romanticism was prevalent in the art of Germany at the beginning of the 19 th century, the characters in Spitzweg’s paintings rarely show signs of the intense internal turmoil habitual for Romanticism. Stylistically, they belong to the Biedermeier – a style often dismissed as decorative and “cozy”. The people in Spitzweg’s world are living small, cozy lives perhaps, but they do have a bright individuality. The painter chose to show them going about their daily lives with dignity and worth, but also quite a bit of eccentric humor. The Serenade. Spitzweg The characters in his genre scenes are the comical, toned-down counterparts of th...