The sentimental
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| The sentimental |
|---|
| Johann Peter Hasenclever , 1846–1847 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 36.5 x 30.5 cm |
| Museum Kunstpalast , Düsseldorf |
The Sentimentale is a painting by the genre painter Johann Peter Hasenclever , which ironically revisits the romantic and sometimes contrived sentimentality of his contemporaries, especially that of some of his colleagues at the Düsseldorf School of Painting .
Description and interpretation
The painting shows a young woman from behind , who looks dreamily and with tears in her eyes out the window at the night sky. The shoulder is bare, barely covered by the loosely tied dark hair; the face is propped up on the hand in a melancholy gesture.
On the table behind her and on the window sill lies a collection of symbolically charged objects and writings: a bouquet of flowers that has half withered due to the length of her waiting, and a love letter to the “dearly beloved Fanny” along with a medallion with the image of the man who wrote it - another portrait of the hussar , for whom the sentiment apparently longingly mourned, hangs on the wall across from her. Goethe's tragic epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and Heinrich Clauren's trivial love story Mimili , decorated with a rose, round off the picture further. A candle is the second source of light in the picture next to the full moon: The latter shines in the face of the languishing lover and is reflected at the same time in the clouds and in the waters of a lake with a lonely tree and, on the opposite bank, an even more lonely hut .
Hasenclever satirizes almost all of the clichés from the pool of emotive romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries in a single picture. The reference to the love epic mimili in particular at the same time the on its slating by Wilhelm Hauff . His 1826 novel The Man in the Moon , written in the manner of Heinrich Claurens and published under his name, can be seen as a literary model for the painting.
Frames
In addition to the copy in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf , there are at least two other almost identical and eponymous handwritten versions of the painting, one of which is in the Cleff house in Hasenclever's hometown of Remscheid and one in private ownership. Hasenclever had already taken up the motif of the sentimental woman looking longingly at the night sky in the portraits of the Study for the Enthusiastic Woman and the Munich Beer Cellar.
literature
- Ekkehard Mai : "Joke, satire, irony and deeper meaning" - The touching and funny thing among the people of Düsseldorf . In: Roland Kanz (ed.): The comical in art . Böhlau, 2007, pp. 138-160.
- Knut Soiné: Johann Peter Hasenclever: A painter in the pre- March period . Schmidt, 1990.
Web links
- Description and interpretation of the picture on the website of the Volmer Collection Foundation