Carl Spitzweg

Carl Spitzweg painted small pictures about small lives and did it with obvious affection. A poor poet in bed under an umbrella, a bookworm up a ladder, a night watchman, a cactus fancier at his window. The Biedermeier world he recorded was already being gently mocked by the time he painted it.

He trained as a pharmacist and came to painting after an illness in his twenties, largely self taught. That outsider route shows in the freedom of the later brushwork, which loosens considerably once he had seen Barbizon and Delacroix on travels through Europe.

The humour is the hook, but the light is why the pictures last. Narrow sunlit alleys, figures pinned against tall walls, small bright details in dim interiors. He sold to a middle class audience buying for their own homes rather than to institutions.