goethe and the dutch interior: a study in the imagery of

Goethe and the Dutch Interior:

A Study in the Imagery of Romanticism

URSULA HOFF

THE A N N U A L LECTURE delivered to

The Australian Academy of the Humanities at its Third Annual General Meeting

at Canberra on 16 May 1972

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 3, 1972

PLATES

PLATE I J. C. Seekatz, The Goethe Family in Shepherd's Costume (1762). Weimar Goethc National Museum

PLATE 2 A. v. Ostade, Peasants in an Interior (1660). Dresden Gallery

PLATE 3 Goethe, Self Portrait in Iris Fra iFr t Romn (c. 1768). Drawing, Weimar Goethe National Museum

PLATE 4 J. Juncker, The Master at his Easel (1752). Kassel Gallery PLATE 5 F. v. Mieris the Elder, The Connoisseur in the Artist's Studio (c. 1660-5). Dresden

Gallery

PLATE 6 D. Chodowiecki, Werlher's Roam. Etching, from The Wallrrf-Richartz Jahrbuch, Vol. XXII, fig. 79

PLATE 7 G. Terhorch, 'I'Instruction Patemelie1 (1650-5). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam P L A ~ 8 G. F. Kersting, The Embroidress (1811). W e b a r Kunstsammlungen

PLATE 9 J. H. W . Tibe in , Goethe from the back lookinp out o f a Window over Rome (c. 1787). Weimar Goethe National Museum

PLATE 10 G. F Kersting, Man Writing by a Window (1811). Weimar Kunstsammlungen

PLATE 11 G. F. Kersting, Reader by Lamplight (1811). Weimar Kunstsamdimgen PLATE 12 G. F. Kersting, C. D. Friedlrich in his Studio (1811). Hamburg Kunsthalle

PLATE 13 Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom at Arles(188g). Chicago Art Institute

The author gratefully acknowledges the kind assistance of the above galleries and museums for permission to reproduce photographs of works from their collections as plates in this paper.


T HE theme of this paper is taken from the history of romantic art. As has often been remarked, romantic painters, rather than introducing a new

style, developed new attitudes; and their attitudes often found expression in the revival or re-interpretation of certain themes which had been used by painters of previous centuries but which were now used in a different m0od.l One of these themes not previously dealt with in this context, is the domestic interior. Goethe appears in my paper in two roles: as a poet and writer, and also as a draughtsman and artist. His artistic output was considerable, and there had been periods in his youth when he had even felt doubts as to his true vocation. We shall meet him here participating in the creation of the imagery of romanticism and we note how the themes that attracted him early on, later acted as a bridge between him and the younger romantic painters, from whom he was divided in so many other ways.

Goethe's artistic interests centred for the greater part of his life on the art of classical antiquity and on the classicism of his contemporaries, J. H. W. Tischbein and Philipp Hackert. Yet in his youth, particularly in the Sturm und D r a w period, Goethe had a keen eye for the realist Dutch art of the seventeenth century. This taste for Dutch realism performed an important service in the development of Goethe's appreciation of art: it helped him to assert himself against the unbridled fantasy and opulence of the French rococo which dom- inated the taste of his father. Realism, close observation of nature later allowed him to link his scientific with his artistic interests and with Rousseau's 'return to nature'.

The young Goethe grew up with the ideology and the taste of a kind of burgher's rococo. His father, following the principle that one should give work to living masters, occupied a number of painters in his house, the most important of whom was perhaps Johann Conrad Seekatz (1719-68): court painter in Darmstadt, who frequently stayed in Frankfort. Rath Goethe had himself and his family portrayed by this artist in Die Familie Goethe in Schdfertracht (The Goethe family in shepherd's costume) of 176.2~ (Plate I). The scene is wholly fanciful: in the manner of the followers ofwatteau, Seekatz has created a kind of fgte chantpetre; Goethe's mother, wearing a bergere hat and a garment in elegant disarray, in keeping with the rustic setting, draws her husband's

For a survey of this problem, see the important article by Jan Bialostocki, 'Romantische Ikonographie' in Stil imd Ikonographie, Dresden 1965, pp.1~6-81, and bibliog.

a See Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book I .

3Reproduced and discussed in: Bernard Gajek, Franz Getting, Jeni Gerres (cds), Coethes Leben und Werk in Daten undBildern, Frankfort a/M 1966, No. 37; Mario Praz, Conversa- tion Pieces, A Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America, London 1971, p.202.


attention to the distant ruins. Rath Goethe, with a cloak picturesquely wrapped around his waist and shoulder, strikes a pose of benign attentiveness. Young Goethe, in tricorne hat, ties a pink ribbon around the neck of a lamb while Cornelia, his sister, stands by holding a doll. The putt! in the far distance embody those of Frau Rath Goethe's children who had died in infancy.

This staged and laboured composition, which tells us little about the character and feeling of the people portrayed, is MI example of the 'lustorical' portrait group fashionable during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a form of portraiture brilliantly ridiculed by Oliver Goldsmith in a well-known passage in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).'* The family of the Vicar want to be portrayed by an itinerant painter; it is decided that they should all be

drawn together in one large historical family piece. This would be cheaper, since one frame would serve for all, and it would be infinitely more genteel for all families of any taste were now drawn in this manner. As we did not immediately recollect a historical subject to suit us, we were contented each with being drawn as independent historical figures.

The Vicar's wife is drawn as Venus, the Vicar in his own role, the small children as cupids, and 'Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing . . .'

The taste exemplified by Scekatz's painting was gradually superseded in the later eighteenth century by a predilection for the direct, the simple and natural, qualities which collectors and painters had begun to admire in the work of the small masters of the Dutch seventeenth century.

The growing popularity of Dutch art is evident from the growth in numbers of reproductive engravings of such work. Unlike Rubens and van Dyck in the southern Netherlands, Dutch painters had not commissioned engravers to reproduce their paintings; such engravings, however, become numerous in the eighteenth century, made mainly by French engravers, bringing Dutch art to the notice of collectors outside Holland. In England, Dutch scenes replace Italian scenes on the walls of interiors seen in Conversation Pieces: Zoffany represents an interior in the house of Sir Lawrence Dundas at 19 Arlington Street, London, painted in 1770, where the picture over the mantel- piece is a seapiece by Jan van de Capelle.6 The bronzes on the shelf below incidentally demonstrate that this new realist taste did not conflict with the taste for classical antiquity.

In Germany, Dutch paintings were acquired by both princely and bourgeois collectors. The collection of the gallery at Kassel, still famous for its fine Dutch masterpieces, was assembled during the early eighteenth century by Landgrave William VIII (1682-1760).' The Landgrave was the godson of the Stadthouder

* Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of WakcfW, P t I, Ch. XVI. See Mario Praz, Aft Illustrated History o f Interior Decoration from Pompeii to Art Nouveau, London 1964, p.149, illus. 112, in the collection of the Marquess of Zetland. Erich Herzog, Die Gemildegalcri der staatlicke~ Kunstsattwlungen Kassel, Hanau 1969, PP.15-24.41.

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William III of Orange and spent his years of military service at The Hague. While in Holland he became familiar with Dutch collectors and connoisseurs and began to acquire Dutch paintings at auction. Later he negotiated directly with several major Dutch collectors. The Kassel collection was known to Goethe whose entry may still be seen in the visitors' book at the date of I October 1783.

The Dresden Gallery. which, as we shall see presently, importantly affected Goethe's taste, owned a vast accumulation of works by the Dutch small masters.' In Frankfort itself in the later eighteenth century many ordinary citizens collected paintings chiefly by Dutch artists, and its painters were much inspired by Dutch art. In Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe refers to Dutch traits in the work of the following painters: Schiitz 'who industriously continued the tradition of Saftleven', Jnncker 'who carried out neat paintings of flowers and fruit, still-lifes and people quietly working in the general manner of the Dutch', and Trautman 'who took Rembrandt as his model with the result that he was once invited to paint a companion picture to one of Rembrandt'~'.~

Throughout the eighteenth century there was much rivalry between the princely houses and the bourgeoisie in their collecting of Dutch art, with the result that prices rose and Dutch owners felt tempted to part with their collections. During the French occupation of Holland, many Dutch families became impoverished and the exodus of Dutch works of art increased. Goethe's out- look was much affected by the naturalism of the Dutch style. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 13, he remarks on the beautiful Frankfort collections and quotes the painter Nothnagel-either Johann Andreas (1729-1804) or his brother Johan Christian l3enj. (1734-after 1762)-as having helped him to fulfil his greatest passion, namely to scc nature in art. Nothnagcl allowed him to paint still lifes in which Goethe occasionally achieved a great deal of verisimilitude to nature. At the same time, however, Goethe created for himself a little museum of casts from antiquity, consisting of heads of Laocoon, of Niobe and her sons, and at that time saw no contradiction between his realist aspirations and his classical interests. Dutch art exercised its greatest influence on Goethe during his years at Leipzig University; he went there in 1765 a t the age of sixteen to study law, and also enrolled under the painter Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-99). friend of Winckelmann and Direktor of the Akademie. Oeser preached the new sin~plicity of taste. In order to convey to the reader something of Ocscr's spirit, Goethe characterizes him in terms of Ills surroundings. He describes his studio as follows: 'Everything was in good taste, simple and so ordered that the small room held a maximum of material. The furniture elegant but without superfluous ornament; because his environment and his teaching came from

' Niels von Hoist, Creators, Collectors and Connoisseurs, London 1967, pp.187-8 (Dresden), pp.ioo-200 (Frankfort). Goethe visited the collection of Johann Friedrich Stadel, the founder of the Staedel Institute, where he admired Head of a Child b y J. G. Cuyp. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book N,

45


the same mould'-they had a far-reaching influence o n the young G ~ e t h e . ~ This use of the interior as a reflection of a personality is the very theme we are discussing in this paper.

Goethe in his Leipzig years gave his undivided enthusiasm to Dutch art of which he was able to see a good many fine originals, such as the etchings and paintings, mostly Dutch, in the cabinet W i k l e r , but he derived his most lasting impressions from his first visit to Dresden, which took place in 1768, when die Royal collections were already accessible to the public. Goethe set out o n his journey in a spirit of romantic adventure:'Q his people were not to know about it; he therefore could not stay with friends in Dresden and had found himself a room at a shoemaker's, whose address he had obtained from one o f his fellow students at Leipzig. The excitement caused by the under- taking, by the unfamiliarity of the simple quarters in which h e found himself and by his first visit to a really great collection of Dutch art, stimulated Goethe's imagination, and the memory of it all later the following well- known passage in Dichtunp und Wahrheit which should be read while looking a t Ostade's Peasants in an Interior (Plate 2) from the Dresden c ~ l l e c t i o n : ~ ~

As I returned to my shoemaker for the midday meal I hardly could believe my eyes; I seemed to see before me a painting by Ostade so perfect that it could have hung in the gallery; the position of the objects, light, shade, brown tone of the whole, the magic effect, everything that one admires in those paintings I saw here in reality.

T h e Dutch small masters, such as Ostade, Dou, and Schalken who specialized i n lower middle class interiors, aroused the young Goethe's passionate admira- tion. H e makes n o reference to the great Rembrandts which also formed part of the Dresden collection, nor does he mention Jacob Ruisdael to whose landscapes he later devoted his 'Ruysdael als Dichter', one ofhis most important

8 Ibid., Book 8: 'wir gelangten auch manchmal in sein d-tossendes inneres Kabinett, welcbes zugleich seine wmigen Biicher, Kunst und Naturaliendungen, und was ihn sonst z d c h s t interessierm mochte, enthielt, Alles war mit Geschmack, einfach und dergestalt gcordnet, dass der kleine R a m sehr vieles umfasste. Die Mobel, Schranke, Portefeuilles elegant, ohne Ziererei oder Uberfluss. So war auch das erste, was er uns empfahl mid worauf er h e r wiedec zuriickkam, die Einfalt in allem, was Kunst und Handwerk vereint hcrvorzubringen berufen sind. Ein abgesagter Feind des SchnOrkel und Muschelwesens, und des ganzen barocken Geschmacks, zeigte er uns dergleichen in Kupfer gestocbne mid gezeichnete alte Muster im Gegensatz mit hesseren Verzier- ungen und einfacheren Formen der Mobel sowohl als andere Zimmemmgebungen, und weil allcs urn ihn her mit diesen Maximen iibereinstimmte, so machten die Worte und Lehren auf uns einen guten und dauernden Eindruck.'

l0Ibid.. Book 8. l1 Book 8: 'Ah ich bei meinem Schuster wieder eintrat, urn das Mittagsmahl zu geniesscn,

trauete icb meinm Augen kaum: durn ich glaubte ein Bild von Ostade vor niir zu seben, so vollkommm, dass man es nur auf die Galerie hatte hangen diirâ‚¬.c Stellung dcr Gegenshde, Licht, Schatten, braunlicher Teint des Ganzen, magishe Haltung, alles was man in jenen Bildern bewundert, sah ich bier in der Wirklichkeit.'

46


essays on art. The reason for this predilection for scenes from everyday life in domestic interiors seemed to him to lie in their closeness to reality: 'Only those pictures appealed to me', he wrote, 'which I could immediately compare with my surroundings, with nature, with ~eality'.'~ But, as we shall see later, the appeal also lay in the revelation of 'the simple life' of unaffected virtue and voluntary restriction which these pictures seemed to c0nvey.1~

Shortly after his return from Leipzig to Frankfort, Goethe made a small drawing which is variously described as a Self Portrait in his Frankfort R o o m (Plate 3) or as representing a friend drawing (or reading) in an interior.14 Whichever it is, the composition bears close resemblance to the studio interior (Plate 4) by the Frankfort painter Juncker whom Goethe had referred to in Dichtung und Wahrheit as a follower of the Dutch school. The boy working on his drawing has the same air of concentrated quiet as the figure in Goethe's drawing, the room a similar eighteenth-century sparseness. Juncker's picture is in the style of the traditional studio interior of the Dutch seventeenth century, as it appears in Mieris' T h e Connoisseur in the Artist's Studio (Plate 5 ) ; in both pictures a story is told, there are many figures, the room connects with other rooms in the house and with the world outside. It is doubtful whether Miens depicted an actually existing interior, since the vaulted room rather resembles the arched chambers inhabited by Rembrandt's Saints. Juncker's portrayal may be 'true' but it is lacking in personal qualities: it is a studio cum shop in which pictures for sale hang on the walls; Goethc's little study differs from all these by showing only one person and in an interior which most likely is the portrayal of an existing private room (even if not his own); there is no narrative, no action, the portrayed is conceived impersonally; he is seen in lost profile, not aware of the intruder; the coat flung on the chair suggests that the sitter has only recently returned from outside; the picture on the easel, the plaster cast and other objects on the wall hint at the small amateur rather than the professional painter or wealthy collector. The simplicity of the scene, the ardent concentration of the sitter convey the feeling which Goethe expressed in two passages in Dichtung und Wahrheit . Towards the end of the eighth book

Ibid., Book 8: '. . . ja ihn [Goethc's guide] ergotzte das Entziicken, das ich bci Stiicken ausserte, wo der Pinsel iiber die Natur den Sieg davontrug: denn solche Dingc waren es vorziiglich, die mich an sich zogen, wo die Vergleichung mit der bek-ten Natur den Wert der Kunst notwending erhohcn musste.'

"With reference to 'verzichtende Einschrankung' see Helmut Rehder, 'Das Symbol dcr Hutte bei Goethe' in Deutsche Vierteliahresschrili fiir Literaturwissemhafi und Geistesoes- . - ,. chichte, 1937, Vol. XV, pp.403-32.

l4 Cormis der Goethezeichnuneen. Vol. I . Nos 1-118. van den Anfanpen bis zur Italienischen . - ~ & e , 1786, Gerhard ~emmel (ed.), k p z i g 1958, No. 93. The editor states that Wahl and Beuder have doubted that the room is in the Frankfort Goethe house and that the sitter is a self portrait. The drawing is variously dated between 1768 and 1773. L. Miinz, Coethes Zei<h~un$m und Radierutyen, Vienna 1949, p.19, pi. I , accepts both attributions as does Helmuth Holzhausen, Goethe Museum, Werk, Leben und Zeit Goethes in Dokumenten und Bildern, Berlin, Weimar 1969, pp.159, 5.41: Goethe in seinem Arbeitszimmcr, c. 1770-3.

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he describes h o w he occupied his lonely existence after having recovered from the illness with which he had returned home from Leipzig late in 1768. Among his various occupations was also that of drawing: 'and since I always wanted t o work directly from nature or from reality, I imitated m y room with its furniture, wi th the persons in it . . .' In Book 15 he remembers how in the last months in the Frankfort house painting and writing used to alternate continuously.

When I dictated or had someone read to me, I sketched the position of the writer or reader with their surroundings . . . As I once during this period, thus occupied, sat in my room which had been given the semblance of an artist's studio by shading the light of the window and in which the walls, hung with half-finished works gave the appearance of great activity, a well grown, slim gentleman entered . . .

T h e interior here has become a symbol for the portrayed and an expression of his ideal of life."

That Goethe could thus conceive of an interior can be seen from his letter t o the countess Stolberg written in May 177s to which he added a sketch. It shows i t t o be much less traditionally inspired than the prcvious one-a music desk, behind it an easel, and at the back a table with books. O n the wall are drawings which appear unframed, casually pinned to the wall.1Â Goethe writes: 'Blessed be the urge which prompted m e instead of any further writing t o make for you a drawing of m y room as I see it before me', and he closes the letter with the line 'Halten Sie einen annen Jungen a m Herzen' (Keep a poor youth close to your heart). The room here takes the place of Goethe himself; at a later date one could imagine a less subtle person enclosing a photograph of himself i n such a letter.17

T o the inspiration of Goethe's writing we owe the room (Plate 6) which is also the portrait of a person in the etchings of the German-Polish artist Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801). Inhis title vignette to Goethe's Wertker, Chodowiecki chose the representation of Wenher's deathchamber." Here is the desk at

See the end of Book 8: 'So vielfach war ich in meiner Einsamkeit besch'dftigt . . . So kam cs auch wieder a n s Zeichnen, und da ich imnicr unmittelbar an der Namr oder vielmehr am Wuklichen arbeiten wollte, so bildete icb mcin Zinmier nach mit seinen M6heln. die Pcrsoncn, die sich darin befanden, . . .' Book 15: '. . . wenn ich diktierte odei mir vorlesen liess, entwarf ich die Stellungen der Schreihendcn und Lesenden, mit ihrer Umgebung; . . . Als ich nun cinst in dieser Epoche und so besch'iftigt, bei gespcrrtem Lichte in meinem Zimmer sass, dem wenigstens der Schcin einer Kiinstlerwerkstatt hierdurch verliehen war, "berdies aucb die Wii~de, mit halbfemgen Arbeiten besteckt und behangen, das Vorurteil ciner grosscn Tatigkeit gaben, so mat ein wohlgebildeter, schlanker Mann bei mir ein.'

lo Ludwig Miinz, Coelhes Zeichnungen und Radiemngen, Wien 1949, p.34, illus. 27; Donat dc Chapeaurouge, 'Das Milieu als Portrait' in Waliraf-Richartz Jahrbuch, VoLXXU, P.137, fig. 76.

l7 Werke (Sophienausgabe) IV, Ahteilung, Vol.2, Weimar 1887, p.243: Geseesegnet der gute Trieb, der mir eingab, statt alien weiteren Schreibcns, Ihnen meine Stube, wie sie da vor mir steht, zu zeichnen.'

' 8 Chapeaurouge, 'Das Milieu als Portrait', loc. cit., p.140, fig.79.

4a


which the hero had written his letters to Lotte. O n the armchair in front of it lies the pistol with which he had shot himself; immediately above on the back wall hangs the si iouette of Lotte. The slightly parted curtains of the bed reveal the corpse of Wenhcr, but his image is hidden. It is the room itself, with its bare essentials of existence, its neat order, which betrays the ascetic and idealistic spirit of the man who occupied it. It is important to notice that Chodowiecki deviated from Goethe's description in order to achieve his effect. Goethe's tale shows us Werther lying on the floor in the agony of death. Chodowiccki's room reminds us of a house preserved by the National Trust.

Long after his return in 1788 from the Italian journey which had turned his taste so decisively towards the ideal beauty and heroic significance of classical art, and long after the publication, in 1798, of the Propylaen, a journal directed against the current literary trends towards the sentimental, the insignificant and the 'all-too-natural', Goethe still on occasion had use for the home truths conveyed by Dutch genre. In 1809 he used Terborch's so-called I'Instruction Patemelle (Plate 7) for a scene in WahlvmandschafterP. Since the picture had undergone a marked change in interpretation between the seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, it is a key witness for the infusion of new moods into old models, which is the Leitmotiv of m y paper and for this reason i t warrants treating here in detail. Goethe relates in Part 2, Chapter 5 of Wahlverwandschajien how Charlotte's daughter, Luciane, entertains her friends by the posing of well-known paintings. One of the paintings is Tcrborch's I'Instmaion Paternelle which Goethe, who knew it from Wille's engraving, describes as follows:

The noble knightly father sits cross-legged and appears to be admonishing his daughter standing before him. The latter, a magnificent figure in a white satin dress which hangs in abundant folds, is seen only from behind, but her whole attitude seems to indicate that she is restraining herself. One can see from the expression and bearing of the father, that the admonition is neither violent nor shaimilg, and as for the mother, she seems to hide a slight embarrassment by looking into a glass of wine which she is sip~ing.~Q

If one can judge from the repeated use of the word scheint (seems to), Goethe

S . J. Gudlaugsson, Katalog der Gemalde Gerard Tcr Borch's sowie biographisches Material, The Hague 1960, No. no(I) (Amsterdam version), No. no(1I) (Berlin version). The picture was known to Goethe from the engraving by J. G. Wilie (1715-1808) made in 1765 from the original then in the Giustiniani collection, Paris; since 1815 in the Berlin Gallery. 'Einen Fuss iiber den andern geschlagen, sitzt ein edler ritterlicher Vater und scheint seiner vor ihm stehenden Tochter ins Gewissen zu reden. Diese, cine herrliche Gestalt, im falrenreichen weissen Atlaskleide, wird zwar nur von hinten gesehcn, aber ihr ganzes Wesen scheint anzudeuten, dass sie sich zusanmennimmt. Dass jedoch die Ermahnung nicht heftig und besch'amend sei, siebt man aus der Miene und Gebkde des Vaters; und was die Mutter betrifft, so schcint diese cine klcinc Verlegenheit zu verbergen, indem sic in ein Glas Wein blickt, das sie eben auszuschliirfen im Begriff ist.'


felt a little uneasy at his own interpretation. It is a fact that the original meaning of Terborch's picture bad been lost, the title 'SInstruction Paternellc' having been invented in the eighteenth century. Whoever invented it perhaps also overpainted the tcll-talc coin with which the gentleman had been equipped by Terborch and which he is holding up for the young lady as an inducement to comply with his wishes. Goethe quite correctly sensed furtiveness in the attitude of the older woman who is a pant to this transaction. Pictures of this kind had been made in the Netherlands since the sixteenth century, often based on the Biblical tale of the prodigal son who wastes his inheritance among drinkers and loose women. Like Hogarth's idle apprentice, such Dutch paintings are moralizing scenes, set by Terborch in an upper class milieu and better described as 'Merry Company'. They are meant as a demonstration of the proverbial truth that money rules the world, or as warning against a life of idleness, though this is pictured as highly att~active.~~ The age of scnsi- bility of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, shrank from such depictions of loose morals and wanted pictures to inspire finer feelings. A father admonishing his daughter would have been as impossible a subject for Terborch as a raucous tavern scene would be for Dante Gabriel Rossem.

About the same time during which Goethe made such eloquent use of Terborch's Merry Company he became interested in a group of young Dresden painters who were strongly influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century paintings. The moving force among these was Caspar David Friedrich, whose landscape drawings Goethe frequently praised in the following years.22 He acquired for Weimar several paintings by Friedrich's close friend Georg Kersting; these are striking examples of Dutch interiors recast in the mood of romanticism and, as we shall see, reminded Goethe of his own early drawings of his room in Frankfort.

A picture from the circle of the Dresden Romantics is The Emhoidress (Plate 8) of 1811 by Georg Kersting (178$-1847).~~ The person sitting by the window

n1 For the relation of Terborch's pictures to Dutch scventccnth-century emblcms see Gudlauggson, Gcrard Ter Borch, The Hague 1959, pp.81-2.

aa In 1805 Friedrich had sent a landscape drawing to an exhibition in Weimar to which Goethe awarded half the prize of the Weimar Friends of Art. In 1807 Goethe was much moved by drawings by Friedrich shown him in Karlsbad. In 1808 he described Fried- rich's drawines as 'delicate, evcn D~OUS'. thoueh not to be generally accepted from a " sterner view of art. O n 18 September t8iolic visited Fricdrich in hisstudioinDresdcn. In later sears Goethe referred disapprovinelv to the mystic-relieious nature of Fricdrich's . . - . - painted landscapes but, though he adversely criticized his ascetic colour schemcs, he admitted that 'perfection is so rare that one must admire it evcn in the strangest form'. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefcn and Bekenntnissen, Sigrid (cd.), Berlin 1968, pp.220, 256,257. ~ ~

23 M a x Sancrlaiidt. Der Stillc Carrrn, Piisseldorf Leipzig 1908, pp.8~-vi, fig. 2 3 . An important article on the intinntc interior in rom3ntic art is Loren2 Eitncr, "Thc Open Window and the Storm-tossed Boat; an Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism' in The Art Bulletin. Vol. XXXVII, 1955, pp.281E

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is Luise Seidler from Jena, a friend of Goethe's Minna Herzlieb. Luise had lost her fiance in the Napoleonic wars; she had then taken a step unusual in her day, by deciding to take up a career. She went to Dresden to study under Gerhard Kugelgen (1772-1820), a portrait painter, and met Caspar David Friedrich and Georg Kersting and also Goethe, who some time later provided her with the means to travel to Italy and in 1824 had her appointed curator of the Weimar collections. The room of The Embroidress conveys the nature of her personality: it is pervaded by the faithful memory of her fiance whose portrait has been freshly decorated with flowering convolvulus. She is surrounded by the objects of domestic occupation, the guitar, the sewing basket and the carefully tended ~ o t - ~ l a n t s in front of the window. The orderly, ~eaceful interior encloses the sitter; it has been shaped by her and seems inseparable from her. Restraint, self-abnegation, simplicity and artistic taste set the tone of this scene.24

The Dutch origin of the concept is very evident when we compare this picture with Vermeer's A Lady Readin2 by a Window (c. 1650) which was well known to Kersting since it is in the Dresden c~l lec t ion .~~ Both pictures have a quietly occupied person turned away from the spectator and reflecting her features in a mirror image. The two pictures are however widely divergent in mood: in Vermeer's pictures the letters read by young women are invariably from a cavalier, whose envoy sometimes waits for an answer in the background. This motif becomes clearer in another picture by Vermeer, The Music Lesson in Buckingham Palace. Here the Lady is seen from the back; a cavalier (? music teacher) is listening.%@ The mirror image reveals her full features and the direction of her glance towards the cavalier. On the wall hangs a picture of Roman Charity, by Baburen; without going further into detail, a hint of the man being held captive by the attraction of the woman is conveyed in the veiled and ambiguous manner which held such charm for the seventeenth- century audience. Kersting's interior is inspired by quite a different spirit. The relationship between a man and a woman also enters this scene; but it here implies tragedy and resignation and cannot be read without a knowledge of the life of the person portrayed. Even the formal means are expressive of this changed spirit. After the sensuous richness of Vermeer's palettea7 we have a sparseness of means, a paleness of colour which is probably foreshadowed by the French neo-classicists, a school with which the Danish Academy at Copenhagen, at which Friedrich and Kersting had studied, stood in close

21 That Kersting's interiors were indeed accurate renderings of existing interiors, may be seen from Kiigelgen's remark about Kersting: 'Er make ni'mlich in kleinem Format, auf Hoiztafeh, sehr saubere Portrats, ganze Figuren, und in einm Umgebung die ebenfalls Portrat war'. Wilhelm von Kiigelgen, Jqenderinnerunfen eines alien Marines, 802-1820, Leipzig 1924, p.94. All Kersting's known paintings, however, are on canvas.

"Laurence Gowing, Vermeer, London 1952, pp.97-103(V), repro. "Ibid. pp.39,52, I I~-z~(XII) . 9' Gowing, Vermeer, p.41.


contact.a8 The picture so appealed to Goethe that he caused it to be acquired for the grandducal collections at Weimar.

The predilection for ambiguity of effect, for backviews which hide and mirror images which reveal, for the inclusion and exclusion of the spectator and the observation of those who believe themselves unobserved which play their part in this and other pictures by Kcrsting, has its parallels in the contemporary literature. T h e Embroidress in particular brings to mind a passage from Jean Paul's novel Quintus Fixlein (1796). The young schoolmaster Fixlein and his future bride, Thinette, stand together at night outside Ius cottage; a candle has been placed in front of the windowpane of the darkened room and the pane acts as a mirror: 'and on it stood reflected among other faces, which Fixlein was fond of, also the one he loved best which he only dared contemplate in reflection, that of T h i ~ e t t e ' . ~ ~

Luise Seidler's reflected face is not an isolated instance, confined to Dresden, but occurs earlier in the work of the Dutchman Jan Ekles the Younger (1759- 93) in M a n sharpening a pen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, painted in 1 7 8 4 . ~ ~ Like Kersting, Ekies revives Vermeer andTerborch but again translates his traditional motif into a new mood. The sparsely furnished room with its rushbottom seats, on one of which the writer has put his coat, is much less elegant than the room of Luise Seidler. A board on the wall serves a simple form of recreation. W e do not know what the man is going to write (or draw), or who he is, but the pale face in the mirror reminds us rather of Werther than of the full-blooded cavaliers of Tcrborch and Vermeer And again, in a manner rare in the seventeenth century, the portrayed is alone.

The figure seen from the back as it appears here and in other pictures by Kersdng, is also connected with Dutch art as we have already seen in Terborch's so-called I'Instruction Paternelle and in Vermeer's Music Lesson. A seated backview figure occurs in Terborch's Cel lo Player (Berlin) ofabout 1675, which existed in various copies through which the composition may have been known to Ekie~.~l A very late picture, it has almost lost its

}For the increase in intimate interiors in France in the taste of the Dutch school see Eimer, 'The Open Window and the Storm-tossed Boat', loc. tit., p.281; for references to empty rooms of notable persons see de Chapcaurouge, 'Das Milieu a l s Portrait', lac. cit. p.142, n. 12, pp.143ff.; for interiors inhabited by the Bonaparte family and rendered in ail informal, intimate manner see Mario Praz, An Illustrated History oflnterior Decoration, p.189 ( J . B. Isabey), p.193, (A. Camtrey), p.198 (de Clarac).

2~ Jean Paul, AiisgewShlte Werke, G. Reimer, Berlin 1847, Vol.VI1, p.142. '. . , deswegen schauete der Korrektor in Einem fort a n die Femterscheiben: denn auf ihnen farhte sich (die Finstemis der Stube diente zur Spiegelfblie) unter andcren Gesichtem, die Fixlein gem hame, auch das liebste ah, das er nur im Widerschein anzublicken wagte, das von Thiennette'. Catalogue of Paintings, Rijkmmseum, Amsterdam, 1960, No. 887 ( A Writer); 1. Rosenberg, S. Slive, E. H, Ter Kuile, Dutch Art and Architechire 1600-1800, Pelican History of Art, London 1966, p.214, pi. 174A as Man sharpening a pen. Gudlaugsson, Katalog der CemSlde Gerard Ter Borch's, No. 272, old copy No. 2723; the author outlines that the figure at the back was originally a man (repr. of this copy in

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moralizing message and conveys little beside the concentration on musicianship. The element of mystery which invariably attaches to backview figures made them particularly popular in the prc-romantic and romantic periods. Goethe tells us in Dichtunx und Wahrheit, Book 8, that Adam Friedrich Oeser, under whom he studied at Leipzig, had painted Shakespeare from the back. In England, Benjamin Robert Haydon portrayed Napoleon from the back, standing on a mountain top, surveying the earth stretching out before him.3a Caspar David Friedrich painted A Mountaineer in a Misty Landscape (1815) surveying the mountains of Saxon S ~ i t z e r l a n d , ~ and he populated many of his land- and sea-scapes with portraits of friends and relatives all seen from the back. A much earlier example of such usage in close connection with the young Goethe is J. H. W. Tischbein's drawing of Goethe from the back looking out of a Window over Rome (Plate 9) drawn in 1786 or 1787, a drawing which remained in Goethe's possession and is now part of the Weimar c~l lec t ions .~~ Friedrich, in a very similar composition, depicted his wife looking out of a window over the Elbe, combining, like Tischbcin, a hint at an interior with the figure.35

Kersting continued to use backview portrait figures with highly individua- lized interiors. In Man Writing by a Window of 1811 (Plate 10). the nnder- statement of the human element has bccn so successful that the name of the sitter has been forgotten.38 The picture may refer to a self-portrait or may represent Wilhclm von Kugelgen, the son of Gcrhard. It shows the occupant in the intimacy of his home; pipes on the window sill, plaster casts on the desk, hat and coat hung on the door, the desk with its open top on which the paraphernalia of writing are spread out, the very attitude of the sitter conveys an impression of life being lived; we feel we are observing, without the knowledge of the sitter, a moment in a time long past. Perhaps even more fully is this impression conveyed by Reader by Lamplight of 1811 (Plate 11).

where the central effect surrounded by enclosing darkness even more vividly conveys a sense of ethos, of voluntary restriction for the sake of an inner life.3'

A literary parallel, though only comparable in a restricted sense, may be

Gerard Ter Borch, p. 162) changed by the artist himself into a matron, who later overpainted by a restorer, now only registers feebly. The change removed the picture from the 'merry company' tradition to which it originally conformed.

=This was one of the paintings brought to Australia by R. Twentyman; see Eric George, The Life and Death of Benjamin Robert Haydon, London 1948, preface; and was shown to me by a former owner. Present whereabouts unknown.

'Reproduced in The Romantic Movement, The Tate Gallery, The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1959, Catalogue No. 150, pi. 67. Privately owned.

=Bernard Gajek, Goethes Leben und Werk, No. 268. It is of interest to note that backvicws play a prominent part in the work of Henry Fuseli, particularly in the erotic costume drawings carried out between 1795 and 1805.

"Â Sauerlandt,.Der Silie Garten, fig. 27. Mario Praz, An Illustrated History oflnterior Decoration, p. 207, fig. 177.

37 [bid., pp.207-8, fig. 176. 'What the painter wants to communicate is a feeling for the interior, for the "apartment" in the fullest meaning of that word. The half-turned

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quoted from Jean Paul's Leben des vergniiften Schulmeisterlein Maria Wuz im Auenfhal (pp. 14-17). Wuz remembers evenings of his childhood and how he used t o rejoice in the expectations of the closing of the window shutters, since after that he sat secure against all things in the lighted chamber; and he describes how he and his brothers and sisters 'felt so secure, so warm and so satisfied in the little closet of their room, which seemed t o be cut out of o r built into the infinite vaults of the univers~'.~'Jean Paul's passage reminds us that the intimacy of the closely confined interior is increased b y an awareness of the infinite outside. Sometimes this awareness is made explicit in paintings by opposing the room t o a distant view seen through a window. Such pictures become frequent at a slightly later period and have been made the subject of an important article by Lorenz Eitner.39

Kersting, too, later extended his picture space by window views, but his early interiors leave the 'outside' t o the spectator's imagination. In C. D. Friedrich in his Studio, 1811 (Plate 12), the window view is excluded b y blinds." Contemporary descriptions make it clear how accurately Kersting rendered what he saw. Friedrich's friend Schuhert, a scientist, wrote down his impressions of a visit to the artist:

The furnishings of his room fitted in well [with the surroundings of die modest suburb of Pirna] there was nothing to be seen except a wooden chair and a table, on which stood the tools of his work. If someone visited him whom he wished to offer a seat, he fetched another wooden chair from the adjoining little chamber, and if two came, a wooden bench was carried in from die hallway near the stairs.41

Kugelgen relates that Friedrich's studio was completely empty, containing nothing except the easel, a chair and a table above which hung, as the only wall decoration, a lonely ruler; even the paintbox, oil bottles and colour rag had been banished into the next room, since Friedrich held that all objects disturbed the world of painting in his mind.42 The picture here shows him at work and the tools of his trade have been admitted. In contrast t o such

figures are truly apart, detached Gom every external thing.' Praz quotes: 'Why long for infinity when happiness is so close at hand? (see Goethe 'Warum in die F m e schweifen / Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah'). 'aber er war so klug, dass er sich erst in einer dritten (Abendstunde) darauf besann, wie er sonst Ahends sich au6 Zuketten der Fenstdaden Geuete, weil er nun ganz gesichert vor allem in der lichten Stube hocktc . . .; wie er und seine Gescbwister . . . in dem aus dem unabsehlichen GewOlbe des Universum herausgeschnittenen oder hineingebauten Kloset ihrer Stube so beschirmt waren, so warm, so satt, so wohl . . .' Jean Paul, S a t l i t h e Werke, Vol. 11, G. Reirner, 1840, p.-241.

39 See n. 23. 40 No monographs on Kersting have been available to me. Dr Hans Werner Grohn has kindly informed me that the most important references to this picture occur in the following: G. J. Kern, 'G.v.K"gelgen's Atelier' in Der Kunstwanderer, Vol. 5 , Berlin 1923-4, pp.63ff; G. Vriesen, Die Innenraumbilder C. F. Kerstinxs, Berlin 1935, p.21; and H. Schrade, Deutscke Malerei der Romanfik, Cologne 1967, p.32. Caspar David Friedrich, Hinz (ed.), pp.35-6. Kiigelgen, Lebenserinnerutqen, p.95.

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studio pictures as we have seen, by Mieris, Juncker, Goethe and Kersting himsclf, the emptiness certainly conveys the character of a lonely cell, a place for withdrawal into the self which eminently well reflects Friedrich's attitude.

Several ofKersting's interiors were acquired by Goethe for the Grand Duke of Weimar's collection: the portrait of Kiigelgen of 1811 was bought about 1813, The Emhroidress at the same time and the Reader by Lamplight in 1818. What contemporaries saw in such paintings has been most revealingly and graphically expressed by Wilhelm von Kugelgen in his memoirs:

It is of undeniable interest to see loved or memorable or excellent persons in their own environment which is suitable for their profession; where such environment has been formed in a characteristic fashion, it is no longer accidental, as little as the house of a snail which originates in the snail.

Kersting and his friends themselves then felt what I have indicated earlier, namely that his interiors express the personality of their inhabitants, that they formed as it were the 'natural habitat' of these people, in short, that they participated in the soul of their owners.43

How much Goethe himself was moved by such feelings may be seen from a passage in Dichtung und Wahrheit written about 1814 (when Weimar was already in possession of two Kersting pictures), but recalling the period shortly before his taking up his ministerial position in Weimar in 1775. He describes how he drew an interior of the room belonging to Fraulein von Klettenberg, a friend of his mother and a deeply religious woman w h o dressed like members of the Herrenhut community; she suffered from a long drawn out illness but bore her lot with great fortitude and cheerfulness. Goethe writes: 'she used to sit tidily and neatly in an armchair next.to the window . . . one evening at sunset she and her surroundings appeared to m e transfigured and I could not resist . . . to make a picture of her and the objects in her room which from the hands of an able artist like Kersting would have had great charm'.*4 Goethe accompanied the painting with a poem in which he calls upon the spectator to share the mystical aura emanating from the sitter and filling the room;

'3 Kiigelgen, Lebenserinnerwigen, p. 94: 'Es ist von unleugbarem Intc~csse, geliebte oder ausgczeichncte und denkwiirdige Personen in der ihnen eigentiimlichen und ihrem Berufc angemcsscnen Umgebung zu sehen, die, wo sic sich auf charakteristische Weise gcstaltet hat, keine Zufalligkeit mehr ist, so wenig als das Haus dm Schnecke, das aus ihr sclbst hemorgeht'. Dichtiing und Wohrheit, Book 1 5 : 'Ich hattc wohl bemcrkcn komen, dass von Zeit zu Zeit ihre Gesundheit ahnahm, allein ich verhehlte mirs und durfte dies urn so eher, als ihre Hciterkeit mit der Krankheit zunahm. Sic pflegte nett und reinlich am Fenster in ihrem Sessel zu sitzen, vemahm die Erz2hhmg meincr Ausfliige mit Wohlwollen . . . Eines Abends, als ich mir eben mancherlei Bilder wiedcr hcrvorgerufen, kam, bei untergehender Some, sie und ihre Umgebung mir wie verklirt vor, und ich konnte mich nicht enthalten, so gut es meine Unfahigkeit zuliess, ihrc Person und die Gegen- stinde des Zimmcrs in ein Bild zu hringen, das unter den Hiinden eines kunstfemgen Malcrs, wic Kersting, h6chst anmutig gewordcn ware. Ich sendcte es an cine auswamgc Frcundin und legte als Kommentar und Supplement ein Lied hinzu.'

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here, thirty-seven years before Kersting's Embroidress, the interior had been used to act as the image of the 'beautiful soul', the soul tested by suffering and transfigured by it to a higher existence.

With this intuitive, almost mystical approach, Goethe and Kersting had taken the Dutch seventeenth-century interior a good deal beyond die aims of its founders. The Dutch ~aintcrs had shown the typical ways of people indoors, often expressing some standard moral precepts. For example, de Hooch's pupil Jansscns Elinga in his W o m a n Readinf" did not portray an individual; the room contains no obviously personal' items; what the woman is reading we can guess from the shoes which are so prominently displayed on the floor; they remind the observant spectator immediately that this is 'holy ground' according to God's word to Moses before the burning bush. The woman is reading the Bible. The light that enters through the window does not remind the spectator of an unknown threatening 'outside', which stands in contrast to the secure 'inside', but it is God's light that illuminates the world.

In contrast to this emblematic view, Gocthe and Kersting aimed at a close personal relationship between a room and a known individual, as close as that between 'the snail and its shell'. This humble image is of special significance; it suggests Vertraulichkeit (familiarity) and Innifkeit (intimacy) and calls to mind passages from Goethe's essay on Falconct? Here Gocthc elaborated on the idea that the great gift of the artist lies in his ability to see nature filled with emotion. This feelmg, he says, cannot grow in palaces; the world lies before him (i.e. the artist) so to speak, as before its creator, who at the same time at which he enjoys his creation, also enjoys all the harmonies by means of which he created it.

Sieh in diesem Zauberspicgel Schaue wie sic sich hiniiber Eincn Traum, wie lieh und gut Aus des Lcbm Woge mitt Untcr ihres Gottes Fliigel Sieh dein Bild ihr gegeniiher Umre Freundin leidend ruht. und den Gott, der fiir Euch litt.

Fiihie, was ich in dem Weben Dieser HimmeWuFt gfUhIt Als mit ungeduldgem Streben Ich die Zeichnung hmgewiihlt.'

For details about Fraulein von Klettenherg see Dichtmig und Wahrheit, Book 8 . Ludwig Miinz, Coethes Zeichnungen, p. 28, notes the above quoted passage and advises that the drawing is lost.

4G Pieter Janssens Elinga (active 1653 to before 1682). Woman Reading, in Bavarian State collections, Munich.

a0 'Aus Goethes Breiftasche' in Nach Falconet und iiber Falconet: 'Ach dieser Zauber ists, der aus den Sden der Grossen und aus ihren Garten flieht, die nur zum Durchstreifen, nur zum Schauplatz der aneinander hinwischenden Eitelkeit ausstaffiert und hesdinitten sind. Nu da, wo Vemaulichkeit, Bediirfius, Innigkeit wohnen, wohnt alle Dichtungs- kraft, and weh dem Kimstler, der seine Hiitte verlisst, um in den akademischen Pranggeb'auden sich zu verflattem. . . . Alle Quellen natiirlicher Empfindung. die der Fiillc unserer V3ter offen waren, schliessen sich ihm.'

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Ah, this charm is absent from the halls of the palaces of the great and from their gardens, which have been created but as passage ways, as places in which vanity displays itself. The power of poetry only lives where familiarity, necessity and intimacy reign. Woe to the artist who leaves his hut to court distraction in the palaces of the academics.

The simple hut of the artist is the source of true feeling; die interiors drawn by the young Goethe and by Kersting reflect this ideal: the simple, well regulated, unspectacular life of the true ~ rea to r .~ '

Again, Goethe's ideas are quite close t o ideas expressed in the writings of the romantic poet Jean Paul who in Quinttis Fixlein in 1797 urges the reader t o pay attention to his immediate surroundings, 'Dcine Stube, Deine Bekannten' (your chamber, your acquaintances). 'Do not let', he writes, 'far-reaching plans bide from you your domestic life, your room, your acquaintances'. And Mario Praz, in his comments on Kersting's interiors, caps this with a quotation from Goethe: 'Warum in die Feme schweifen, sieh, das Gute liegt so

E P I L O G U E

The interior whose history we have followed from the seventeenth t o the early nineteenth century retains its hold o n painters for the rest of the century;49 often in the form of the empty interior, as in Gustav Carus's Interior in M o o n - light of 1826 where the lonely easel seems to have a mysterious significance like an altar for a new creed.

With the rise of realism and the concern with observation of light, the depictions of interiors acquire a sensuous fullness of handling: Menzel in T h e Balcony R o o m of 1845 suggests domestic peace, interweaving with summer warmth. T h e Bedroom of 1847 by the same artist has an immediacy which makes one feel that one is looking into this room at a specific moment in time. Both pictures are without romantic mystery: the air and sun that come into the Balcony R o o m are sensuous; the world beyond the window in T h e Bedroom is not a mysterious universe, but just the other side of the street. In the art of

47 A portrait interior of similar intimacy in English romantic art is that of John Keats by Joseph Severn, made in Rome in 1821 after Keats's death, in recollection of a scene observed by Severn on a visit to Keats's house in Hampstcad in 1819. Severn wrote: 'The morning of my visit to Hampstead I found him seated the two chairs arranged as I have shown it . . . the room, the open window, the carpet, the chairs are faithfully represented, even to the portrait of Shakespeare engraved in mezzotint (on the wall).' See La Peinture Rottiantique Aiiglaise et les Preraphaeiiles, Petit Palais, Paris, British Council, January-April 1972, No. 249. See n. 37; for Goethe's transformation of yet another theme from Dutch art, namely the Vanitas Still Life, from a general symbol to the memorial for an individual, see Chapeaurouge, 'Das Milieu als Portrait', loc. cit., p. 145.

40Chapeaurouge, fig. 81 (Carus), figs 83, 84 (Menzel); see also Heinz Ladendorf, 'Die Motivkunde und die Malexi dcs 19. Jahrhunderts' in Festschrift Dr. h.c. Eduard Traut- schold, Hamburg 1963, pp.173ff.; and K. K. Eberlein, 'Atelierbildnis' in Reallexikon der Deutschm Kunstgeschichte, 0. Schmitt (ed.), I, pp.1175ff.

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van Gogh the interior, Bedroom at Aries (1889) (Plate 13), achieves expressive force.50 In the painter's own words it is conceived as a refuge, but the tkeaten- ing universe does not lie outside but inside the painter himself; the room is conceived as a fortress against madness and the abrupt foreshorte~ngs, the brilliant colours convey to us the hypertensions of van Gogh's personality. But perhaps one should beware of giving it too personal an interpretation. The contrast between the highstrung effect of van Gogh's Bedroom and the healthy, normal effect of Menzel's Bedroom resembles in kind the difference between the natural, rational interiors of Dickens and the obsessive, claustro- phobic, disquieting interiors in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Huysmans or Ibsen.

Chapeaurouge, 'Das Milieu als Portrait', loc. cit., fig. 85; the author, however, denies that the room has self-portrait character. See also The Complete Letters of Vincent van Cogh, Vol. Ill, London 1958, p. 86, letter to Vincent van Gogh, n.d. but probably September 1888.


goethe and the dutch interior: a study in the imagery of

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