The astrologer

The Astrologer of 1863, at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, belongs to the mature phase of Spitzweg's career when his technique had absorbed lessons from Dutch masters and French Barbizon painters encountered during his travels. Astrology and astronomy were favourite Spitzweg subjects because they allowed him to portray the lone, slightly eccentric scholar absorbed in arcane knowledge — a figure type he found endlessly sympathetic and slightly comic. By 1863 Bavaria was on the verge of the political changes that would transform it from an independent kingdom to a constituent of the new German empire; Spitzweg's world of cosy, unhurried Biedermeier scholarship felt increasingly nostalgic against this backdrop, which may have heightened its appeal to Munich's middle-class audience. The astrologer's tower or attic studio — common in Spitzweg's scholar subjects — creates an isolated, vertical space that separates the devoted eccentric from the busy world below. The Hamburger Kunsthalle, assembling Spitzweg works as examples of significant nineteenth-century German genre painting, preserves this mature work alongside several others.

Canvas with Spitzweg's mature technique showing the influence of Dutch tenebrist lighting absorbed through study of Rembrandt and his school; the scholar's face and hands are lit by candlelight or lamp against a dark background. The figure's isolation in the upper portion of the composition creates a vertical spaciousness unusual in Spitzweg's typically intimate formats. Books, scrolls, and astronomical instruments form a cluttered still-life environment around the central figure.