Carl Spitzweg (German, 1808–1885), Scholar of Natural Sciences, 1875/80. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 22 1/2 × 13 3/4 in. (57.15 × 34.93 cm). Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of the René von Schleinitz Foundation. M1962.136. Photo: Larry Sanders.
Carl Spitzweg is regarded as the master of small-scale genre painting, in which he was fond of depicting—with a fine, ambiguous sense of humor—anecdotal scenes of narrow-minded bourgeois life in the so-called “good old days.” A pharmacist and self-taught painter, he devoted himself entirely to his art after an inheritance from his father made him financially independent. This work, one of Spitzweg’s most famous paintings, is a satire on lofty scholarly ambitions that inevitably fail in the absence of genuine ability. The dedicated scholar depicted here might also be self-referential. As a pharmacist, Spitzweg certainly knew that in the 19th century mummies and crocodiles were used for curative powders and that mummy coffins and stuffed crocodile skins were often displayed in apothecary shops to awe and mystify patrons.
Website label, 2006. Written by Laurie Winters, Curator of Earlier European Art.
