The Poor Poet

genre

Spitzweg was regarded as the secluded "painter-poet of Munich's Heumarkt," an eccentric who never displayed his extensive traveling. With Spitzweg Biedermeier painting as such comes to an end. He is still describing this world, but with the objectivity and distance of the observer.

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About the Artist

Carl Spitzweg

1808 – 1885

German painter and graphic artist, active in his native Munich. He began his career as a pharmacist, and turned fairly late to art, first as a newspaper caricaturist, then as a painter. Although he travelled widely (England, France, Italy, and elsewhere), he was provincial in his choice of subjects and is an outstanding representative of the Biedermeier style. His pictures are generally small, humorous in content, and full of lovingly depicted anecdotal detail {The Poor Poet, Neue Pinakothek, Munich, 1839, and other versions). He also painted excellent landscapes that show a debt to the Barbizon School.

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