![]() ![]() He is illuminated with the soft golden light that is a hallmark of Spitzweg's work, but the scholar's interest in the light streaming from the unseen window extends only so far as it allows him to see the words on the pages of his old books. In the lower left corner of the painting an old faded globe can be seen the bookworm is not interested in the outside world, but in the knowledge of the past. ![]() The painting was executed two years after the revolutions of 1848 provided a shock to the stable world embodied in the dusty solitude of the library. The intensity with which he stares at his book in the dusty old once-glorious library with its frescoed ceiling mirrors the inward-looking attitudes and return to conservative values that affected Europe during the period. His black knee-breeches suggest a courtly status. A handkerchief, carelessly replaced, trails from his pocket. Unaware of his apparently princely or abbatial Baroque surroundings, he is totally absorbed in his researches. The picture shows an untidily dressed elderly bibliophile standing on top of a library ladder with several large volumes jammed under his arms and between his legs as he peers short-sightedly at a book. A final version of the piece was painted in 1884. ![]() In December 2014, the painting was placed on permanent loan to the Grohmann Museum at Milwaukee School of Engineering in Milwaukee. This exemplar found its way into René Schleinitz's art collection and was bequeathed to the Milwaukee Public Library and housed in their Central Library (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). An exemplar of the same dimensions was painted by Spitzweg a year later and sent for sale to his New York art dealer HW Schaus. 1850, was listed under the title of The Librarian and sold in Vienna to Ignaz Kuranda in 1852 and now belongs to the collection of the Museum Georg Schäfer in Schweinfurt. The painting is representative of the introspective and conservative mood in Europe during the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutions of 1848, but at the same time pokes fun at those attitudes by embodying them in the fusty old scholar unconcerned with the affairs of the mundane world.Ĭarl Spitzweg painted three variations of this piece. The picture is typical of Spitzweg's humorous, anecdotal style and it is characteristic of Biedermeier art in general. The Bookworm (German: Der Bücherwurm) is an 1857 oil-on-canvas painting by the German painter and poet Carl Spitzweg. ![]()
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