The Sailor's Wedding
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| The Sailor's Wedding |
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| Richard Caton Woodville , 1852 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 46.2 x 55.2 cm |
| Walters Art Museum |
The Sailor's Wedding , German The wedding Sailor is the title of a genre painting of the American artist Richard Caton Woodville . The group picture was taken in 1852 in the narrative style of the Düsseldorf School of Painting and shows the sudden arrival of a petty-bourgeois wedding party at an American registrar who is disturbed at his lunch .
Description and meaning
A wedding party of six has just arrived at the magistrate's office of the justice of the peace . The painter portrays this official, who is also responsible for weddings, as a strange gray-haired man in an armchair by the window. His grim look, through which he critically examines the arriving company through glasses, forms the focus of the action. A plate in front of him on the chair explains the reason for his displeasure. There lies a roast chicken that the black maid standing next to him has just brought in a basket and that he would like to eat over a glass of wine. He's already got a piece of the chicken on his fork. During his lunch break, he is now bothered by this audience, in the wake of which even a few curious spectators have gathered at the door.
The wedding party is led by a witness who underscores the request for the wedding with a submissive bow. Half of his right hand, with which he points to the wedding couple, is still wearing a white glove, which he couldn't quite remove in his hurry. The groom is a slim, red-blond young man in a sailor's uniform, who towers above the wedding party by a head. The black patent-leather hat he respectfully removed bears the words America in gold letters . He directs his blue eyes forward without a specific goal, as if he is already imagining the future of married life. To characterize him, the painter gave him a noticeably reddened nose; he was referring to the proverbial predilection of seafarers for alcoholic beverages. Hooked into the left arm of her future husband, her gaze cheekily lowered, the bride waits for her wedding in a crisp white frilly dress. Behind her are her parents and her sister. While the bride's father, an old man with a top hat, soon seems to be whimpering with emotion, his wife, who wears a black cap, looks calmly towards the wedding of her daughter.
Among the people who enliven the scene at the entrance, a black mummy emerges who tries to prevent a boy from entering the office barefoot by grasping the head. Beside her, a black servant is also trying to stop the rush of the curious. Since the scene falls in the early 19th century, the justice of the peace staff is likely to consist of slaves .
With a love for detail, realism and the charm of the everyday, with which he takes up memories of his youth from Baltimore , but also with a pronounced tendency to biting mockery of the petty bourgeoisie , the painter describes the details of the high and spacious office next to the figures in his scene. It is dominated by a classicist black marble fireplace and a wide stucco cornice. A map hangs over the mantelpiece. Two elegant brass firebacks protrude from the fireplace. In contrast, there is the intrusive zigzag pattern of the Biedermeier wallpaper. Although the room offers a lot of space, the justice of the peace has moved his desk close to the window and a cabinet that is filled with official documents. Books and other things pile up on the cabinet, the door of which is open. The armchair of the justice of the peace stands at right angles to the desk, and diagonally in front of him is a simple chair that he has repurposed for the dining table. The non-uniform, compact ensemble of furniture expands an open box covered with goatskin, from which some books and notebooks have fallen out and are scattered untidily on the floor. Its wooden planks have some stains. The gray ceiling, which lacks a magnificent chandelier in the middle, has seen better days - like the entire room. To round off the moral image, the painter added a red tin spittoon to the scene as his personal ironic trademark . Overall, the space and the actors act like a box set when a Schwank is performed .
Origin and provenance
Richard Caton Woodville painted the picture in Paris in 1852 . There he lived with his lover and later wife Antoinette Schnitzler , a daughter of the architect and local politician Anton Schnitzler . Previously, he had, after an aborted medical studies since 1845 with his first wife, who left him in 1850 with the joint children in Dusseldorf lived and in private lessons with to 1851 Karl Ferdinand Sohn be trained for academic painter. His greatest role model within the Düsseldorf School of Painting was Johann Peter Hasenclever , who - deviating from the official line of the Düsseldorf Art Academy - cultivated genre painting and in this genre a humorous and socially critical realism. He adopted various stylistic devices from Hasenclever, including those for irony and the psychological depiction of strange characters.
With his picture Woodville took up the broad European tradition of genre painting, in particular the work of the British painters William Hogarth and David Wilkie as well as the moral image of Dutch painting of the Golden Age, which he and his compatriot Emanuel Leutze traveled to in 1846 Had studied in Amsterdam . Within the Düsseldorf School of Painting, whose school tradition he took from the box stage with side incidence of light, he found further stimuli in addition to Hasenclever's studio scene (1836), such as Rudolf Jordan's proposal to marry Heligoland (1834) and Peter Schwingen's seizure (1846).
The painting was acquired by William T. Walters through an art dealer in 1861 and bequeathed to Henry Walters in 1894 , who bequeathed it to the Walters Art Museum in 1931 .
literature
- Steffen Krautzig: The Marriage of the Sailor, 1852 . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 2, p. 421 (Cat. No. 362).
- Sailor's Wedding, 1852 . In: Wend von Kalnein : The Düsseldorf School of Painting . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1979, ISBN 3-8053-0409-9 , p. 502 f. (Cat. No. 269).
Web links
- The Sailor's Wedding , picture explanation in the portal artsandculture.google.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Wend von Kalnein : The influence of Düsseldorf on painting outside Germany . In: Wend von Kalnein: The Düsseldorf School of Painting . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Düsseldorf 1979, ISBN 3-8053-0409-9 , p. 204
- ↑ Wend von Kalnein, p. 503
- ^ Wolfgang Hütt : Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule 1819–1869 . VEB EA Seemann Buch- und Kunstverlag, Leipzig 1984, p. 173