Der Schreiber

Der Schreiber (The Writer or Scribe, 1880) at the Bavarian State Painting Collections joins the company of Spitzweg's learned and literary character studies — the Bookworm, the History Painter, the monk with his breviary — as an image of the solitary man devoted to written language. By 1880 Spitzweg was seventy-five and using paperboard as a support — a characteristic late-career choice that suited his sketchy, direct execution. The scribe or writer figure participates in a broader Biedermeier iconography of the desk-bound intellectual as both admirable and gently comic. The act of writing is rendered as total absorption: the surrounding world disappears, leaving only the man, his paper, and the movement of his pen.

Paperboard, like cardboard, dries paint quickly and provides a matte, absorbent surface ideal for the direct, sketchy technique of late Spitzweg. The figure at a desk — head bent, one hand holding the pen, perhaps the other steadying the paper — is a compositional type well established in his work, allowing him to concentrate on the characterising posture of intellectual absorption.