In the Turkish Bazaar

In the Turkish Bazaar of around 1860, at the Museum Georg Schäfer, reflects Spitzweg's engagement with Orientalism — the European artistic fascination with Middle Eastern and Ottoman culture that peaked in the mid-nineteenth century following Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, Romantic travel literature, and a succession of major exhibitions. Spitzweg visited the Paris World Exhibition of 1855 and was exposed to French Orientalist painting there; he may also have drawn on travel accounts, prints, and the ethnographic material available in Munich collections. The Turkish bazaar as a subject offered painters the maximum contrast with European commercial practice: the multiplicity of goods, the atmospheric light through canvas awnings, the haggling negotiation, and the accumulated visual texture of fabrics, metalwork, and foodstuffs. Spitzweg's version translates the exotic subject into his characteristic warm, slightly comic idiom — the bazaar is an adventure in colour and texture rather than a documentary of cultural difference.

Panel with mature technique; the bazaar setting demands a chromatic richness and textural variety beyond anything in Spitzweg's domestic Bavarian subjects — fabrics, metalwork, ceramic, foodstuffs, and the complex light of a covered market all compressed into a single composition. The warm palette suits both the ambient Mediterranean light and the accumulated warm tones of textile display. Figure groups in the market negotiate, browse, and display goods with the animated quality of his best figure scenes.