Am Sonntagmorgen 1851 - 1855

Carl Spitzweg created "Am Sonntagmorgen" with oil paints on a canvas surface. The application of paint is particularly interesting here, and ties into the painting's wider social context. Look closely and you'll see many visible brushstrokes, layered on top of each other to create texture and depth. The rough, almost haphazard execution suggests an interesting tension. On one hand, the subject - a man peacefully reading in a garden - speaks to a bourgeois desire for leisure and cultivated gentility. Yet the relative lack of finish in the painting hints at the social realities underpinning that lifestyle. Oil painting was a well-established, even academic medium in Spitzweg's time. However, his rather casual approach rejects the laborious realism favored by the art establishment. Instead, it may imply something about the conditions of artistic production and consumption during the rise of industrial capitalism, with a rising merchant class with more money than time to pose for the perfection of portraiture. The painting encourages us to consider the relationship between labor, leisure, and artistic creation in 19th-century society.