Man with a Peep Box Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

From the 1840s, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller devoted himself intensively to genre painting. Typically depicting the lives of the peasants in the countryside around Vienna, his genre pictures were soon as popular with the public as his portraiture.
In this scene, a travelling performer is showing pictures to an enthralled village audience. The subject of the spectacle is not revealed: as the original title of the work (Kinderlust, or Childhood Pleasure) suggests, Waldmüller wanted the emphasis to remain on the villagers’ reactions. Shown standing almost in line in the narrow pictorial field, the audience is divided into groups that might be interpreted as a series of small genre paintings, woven together by the carefully calculated angles of the arms and heads, the direction of the gazes, and the representation of the contrast between light and shadow. This last aspect was particularly important to Waldmüller: in his polemical essays submitted to the Vienna Academy in 1846–1847, the correct rendering of the contrast between light and shadow was defined as the foundation of painting. Even before it was shown for the first time at the 1848 exhibition at the Vienna Academy, the painting was acquired from the artist for the Esterházy Collection, where Waldmüller had spent some time working as a conservator.

Dominika Sodics