The girl with the dead bird
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| The girl with the dead bird |
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| Anselm Feuerbach , 1854 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 99 x 80.7 cm |
| Lower Saxony State Museum |
The Girl with the Dead Bird is a painting by the classicist painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829–1880). The oil painting with the dimensions 99 × 80.7 cm was created in Karlsruhe in 1854 and has been in the Lower Saxony State Gallery since 1913 , which is part of the Lower Saxony State Museum as a collection .
Anselm Feuerbach calls the picture in his work Ein Vermächtnis (posthumously Vienna 1882) “girl mourning a dead bird”. Julius Allgeyer and Hermann Uhde-Bernays do the same in their catalog raisonnés. The title "The girl with the dead bird" is carried by the Lower Saxony State Museum and was adopted in the catalog raisonné by Jürgen Ecker (Munich 1991).
Description and interpretation
The painting shows a girl crouching in front of the prone carcass of a bird. Your gaze falls on a rose that fills the lower left corner between the girl and the bird. The background of the picture is characterized by an oblique horizontal line, which underlines the motif of frailty and death. The colors of the picture are mostly gloomy: the landscape is brown, the girl's dress green-gray, the bird's corpse brown and pale. Black clouds also appear in the green sky.
The subject of death has no direct reference to the artist's life phase. In Jürgen Ecker's view, it is an attempt to interpret the world, as Feuerbach did with his painting The Death of the Poet Pietro Aretino (also 1854). Feuerbach also uses the tension-generating means of the crooked horizon in his painting The Temptation of St. Anthony .
Provenance
The catalog of the Lower Saxony State Gallery gives a detailed description of the provenance of the work. It was acquired from the artist in Karlsruhe by the court confectioner Fellmeth and passed on to his daughter, who then sold it to the Winter Collection in Karlsruhe. From there it was transferred to the Fries-Winter collection in Basel in 1907 and shortly afterwards to the Siegfried Buchenau collection in Lübeck-Niendorf. In 1913 it was sold to the Lower Saxony State Museum by Professor Biermann in the art trade.
literature
- Jürgen Ecker: Anselm Feuerbach. Life and work, critical catalog of the paintings, oil sketches and oil studies, Hirmer, Munich 1991. p. 129.