Carl Spitzweg 1808-1885

By Rosie Miller

Carl Spitzweg, Der Bücherwurm, c.1850, oil on canvas, Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Bavaria

Born in Unterpfaffenhofen, Bavaria, on 5th February 1808, Carl Spitzweg represents something of an enigma within the canon of Western art; despite immense popularity among his contemporaries, Spitzweg – and the wider Biedermeier movement to which he was associated – remains one of the least studied, and often misunderstood, players in Modern European art. 

The reasons for this are topical in relation to contemporary ‘Modernist’ art-historical narratives. Fundamental to the Biedermeier movement was the elicitation of the familiar and the sentimental; Spitzweg’s choice of eccentric, gently humorous subjects – paired with his manner, which drew heavily on the influence of Flemish genre masters – contradicted the accepted paradigm of a linear, teleological development towards Modernism in Western art.

A more recent appreciation for the institutionalised privileging of ‘modernity’, which plagued 19th and 20th-century art-historical scholarship, has highlighted the short-sightedness of such a view. Far from occupying an outmoded past, Spitweg’s sentimentalist vocabulary grew out of German perceptions of the Modern Age. The first half of the 19th Century, marred by the impact of Napoleonic warfare and developments in English mass-production technology, was characterised by economic hardship and sociocultural dislocation. In this context, Spitweg’s caricatures evoke the precariousness of German provincialism to a compelling degree.

The fusty, bibliophilic subject of Der Bücherwurm, (The Bookworm), is steeped in images of instability. The elderly figure, balanced atop a ladder whose base stretches precariously out of view, doggedly clasps tomes across his person. Significantly, the section from which he is reading – ‘Metaphysics’ – proffers an outer-worldly alternative to the ominously shadowed globe that occupies the left foreground.

In this way, the figure voices a satirical complaint against the introspection and conservatism endemic to European petit bourgeois society in the years preceding the revolutions of 1848. Undoubtedly, Spitweg’s gently humorous vocabulary and romanticised subject matter diverges considerably from canonical Western artistic responses to war and violence – notably the works of Jacques-Louis David, and the later Dada and Abstract Impressionist movements. Equally certain, however, is that Spitweg’s paintings articulate valid and influential evocations of modernity; Norman Rockwell’s 1926 tribute, The Bookworm, lies testament to the legacy of Biedermeier artists within the art-historical narrative of Modernism.  

Bibliography

Albert Boime, ‘Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871’, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) 

Benjamin Block, ‘A Chronic Tuberculosis: Carl Spitzweg and the Biedermeier’, in, Writing Excellence Award Winners, 50, (Spring 2014)

Rockwell Centre for American Visual Studies, ‘The Bookworm: Rockwell’s Tribute to Carl Spitzweg’, Exploring Illustration: Essays in Visual Studies, 7 March, 2013, http://www.rockwell-center.org/category/exploring-illustration/ [accessed 29 January 2022]