Carl Spitzweg Lot n° 78

Carl Spitzweg, The Sunday hunter Oil on canvas, marginal doubling. (Circa 1845). 30.9 x 25.2 cm. Bottom left with the monogram "S in rhombus", signed again on the verso "C. Spitzweg pinx. Monachij 1845". Framed. Sunday has a special significance in the work of Carl Spitzweg - here he observed how aspiring, prosperous citizens pursue their very own interests in their limited free time: In addition to going to church, which rarely interested Spitzweg, it was the Sunday walk that demanded everything of Spitzweg's walkers - whether because of the summer heat or other misfortunes - he sent his protagonists on forbidden paths on Sundays and here the bourgeois could pursue his quirky interests as a cactus lover or a bookworm, but the greatest evil was considered to be the Sunday hunters, who swarmed out on Sundays to hunt and kill game in the wilderness. The so-called "Sunday hunters" were encountered everywhere in the 19th century, since in the course of the social upheavals caused by the French Revolution, first in France, the hunting privilege of the nobility had already been abolished in 1798 and a liberation of the land from foreign hunting rights had been pronounced. From then on, the bourgeoisie claimed its own hunting rights and swarmed into the woods to hunt game, which, however, was hardly successful. In the pre-March period, the Sunday hunter was a commonly feared figure who was generally subjected to ridicule in words and pictures due to his improper practice of hunting - Honoré Daumier, for example, depicted this madness of bourgeois self-realization in several lithographs. In Germany, too, several individual states followed the French example during the Vormärz period, and in Prussia, too, all hunting restrictions were lifted after the revolution of 1848. "Sunday hunter" was a derisive term used by the nobility and foresters, because the bourgeois hunting enthusiast, due to his professional activity, was only able to pursue hunting in his free time, actually only on Sundays. He was not professionally trained and was feared and exposed to ridicule because of his naïve huntsman's ideas and his hunting incompetence, which in the worst case endangered himself, because the wealthy townspeople did not devote themselves to hunting out of love for game and nature, but for reasons of prestige. The former privilege of the nobility had reached the world of the bourgeois, who went hunting to document his social advancement. Everywhere one encountered the Sunday hunter in the vain search for hunting luck; he had almost become a danger to public order. After 1850, there were first efforts to ban Sunday hunting, also in order to protect churchgoing and church services on Sundays and holidays. As late as 1895, the "Holy Family," an illustrated Catholic monthly, warned of the dire consequences of this "Sunday desecration," in which Sunday hunters would replace churchgoing with Sunday stalking. The Sunday hunter was thus an omnipresent social theme around 1850; he was present in music and literature, in theater - and of course in painting. He was a subject that was tailor-made for Spitzweg. Here he could not only expose the foibles of his fellow citizens, but also put the social contradictions at the end of the Biedermeier era into the picture with irony. In his list of sales of his paintings for the years 1840 to 1846, Spitzweg listed a total of seven paintings with this theme - the Sunday hunter, usually dressed in a less than hunterly manner with a light coat, top hat and leather hunting bag, is out stalking, but due to his poor eyesight is wandering around in the woods, hoping in vain for capital prey. Another type of picture shows the Sunday hunter at rest, in a moment of pause at breakfast (Prague, Narodni Galerie, inv. no. 010854). He has just taken his goodies out of his bag and is eating his snack when, as if out of nowhere, the roebuck he has been waiting for so long appears. Our Sunday hunter, who concludes Spitzweg's preoccupation with the subject in 1845, also belongs to this type. In his meticulously kept list of sales, it appears as no. 63, where it says: "Sonntagsjäger (sitzend en face mit Rehböckchen)". Spitzweg had offered it in Zurich in 1846, but the painting reached the Bavarian Consul in Christiana in Norway through the mediation of his painter friend Eduard Schleich. Our somewhat corpulent Sunday hunter with his slightly swollen nose has also allowed himself a moment of pause in his strenuous search for prey and has settled down on a bench overgrown with grass, ivy and all kinds of other shrubs, behind which rises a mighty beech tree. The rifle always within reach on a b