Waiting for the stage
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| Waiting for the stage |
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| Richard Caton Woodville , 1851 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 38.1 x 46 cm |
| National Gallery of Art |
Waiting for the Stage , German waiting time before departure , is the title of 1851 in Paris created genre painting of the American artist Richard Caton Woodville . The picture shows three men in the narrative style of the Düsseldorf school of painting in the interior of a simple tavern . Two pass the time waiting for a stagecoach by playing cards . A third person appears to be reading a newspaper , but a second glance reveals his actual role.
Description and meaning
There are three men in a tavern, which according to the picture's title is the station of a stagecoach . The restaurant, which is heated by a cast iron stove, makes a very simple impression due to inconsistent furnishings and a somewhat dirty floor. A spittoon , the painter's trademark in many of his pictures, is not missing.
Two of the men are seated at the table. With cards they play for money that lies on the bare table in the form of silver coins. A good-natured, somewhat plump redhead with a full beard, who is married according to his wedding ring, has already had a drink from the brandy carafe on the table next to him . He is in good spirits after looking at his hand and playing it. His teammate, whom the viewer only sees from behind, is a man with a black cylinder on his head, a long black frock coat and a bag ready to leave next to him. Holding up his hand, he is about to draw a card.
The third person, a man of advanced age, stands at the table as if by chance and appears to be reading a newspaper. A blue and white neckerchief over a green checked waistcoat and a fawn coat give the man who wears a fur-lined dark peaked cap an unusual look. His glasses are also strange, with green lenses on both the front and the sides. Such glasses were prescribed by ophthalmologists at that time to counter certain eye diseases and poor eyesight.
In order to direct the viewer's gaze to this strange figure, the painter has placed a mirror on the wall behind her in such a way that its gold rim seems to frame the figure's head. If you follow the painter's gaze and try to recognize the mysterious person's eyes behind the green lenses of the glasses, you discover that they are intensely fixating the viewer. A strange feeling that something is wrong with this person intensifies when looking at the head of the front page of the newspaper. There it says The Spy , in German The Spy . This nod from the painter suddenly illuminates the role of the third person in the scene: She is in cahoots with the cylinder support and spies on the redhead's cards.
Emergence
Richard Caton Woodville painted the picture in Paris, where he had traveled with his lover and later wife Antoinette Schnitzler , a daughter of the architect and local politician Anton Schnitzler . After breaking off medical studies in the United States, he had lived in Düsseldorf with his first wife from 1845, who left him around 1850 with their children, and had been trained as an academic painter in private lessons from Karl Ferdinand Sohn until 1851 .
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.
The motif of the newspaper reader found its way into his work through Hasenclever and Wilhelm Kleinenbroich . Before this picture, he had used the newspaper reader motif in the paintings War News from Mexico and Politics in an Oyster House . The motif of the card players reappears in his work in this picture, after he had already begun to explore the pictorial possibilities of this subject in the painting The Card Players , today in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts , in 1847.
literature
- Peter John Brownlee: The Commerce of Vision. Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2019, ISBN 978-0-8122-5042-8 , Figures 59, 60.
Web links
- Waiting for the Stage , object data sheet and picture explanation in the portal nga.gov ( National Gallery of Art )
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