Sleeping Savoyard Boy

Sleeping Savoyard Boy (1869), in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, is one of Leibl's earliest genre subjects and connects to a long European tradition of paintings of sleeping children and youthful street figures. The Savoyards — itinerant workers from the Savoie region of the Alps who traveled to larger cities as chimney sweeps, street musicians, and odd-job men — were a recognized social type in nineteenth-century European genre painting, treated by everyone from Greuze to Courbet. Leibl encountered this subject in Munich, and his treatment, characteristically, strips away sentimentality: the boy is simply asleep, his face relaxed into unconsciousness, his body given over to rest in the way that working people sleep — heavily, without the self-consciousness of the studio. The Hermitage acquired the canvas as part of its exceptional collection of German Realist painting, which includes other important works by the Munich school.

The composition concentrates almost entirely on the face and upper body of the sleeping figure, with the surroundings minimized. Leibl models the relaxed face through careful observation of how muscles soften in sleep — the mouth slightly open, the brow uncontracted. The paint surface is controlled without being overworked, suggesting rapid but confident execution.