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| Adriaen van Ostad, The Painter in His Studio |
When I have an idea for a blog post, I always imagine it can be accomplished quickly. And, yet, every post on Goethe takes me far afield, because there are so many trails that lead from him or to him. I have a feeling that this will be a two-parter.
Take the case of Goethe’s visit to Dresden in 1768, when he was a student in Leipzig. My original idea for this post came from my recent re-reading of books 7 and 8 of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit and, in particular the episode of the shoemaker, a relative of a fellow student of Goethe’s in Leipzig. Of all the bad luck, the two pages dealing with that visit are missing in the electronic file of Loeper that I have been reading in conjunction with the autobiography. Trunz, however, in his commentary, asserts that the shoemaker was real, if not the details that Goethe describes concerning his visit and lodgings with the shoemaker. On meeting the man, Goethe engaged with him in a lighthearted conversation that showed the shoemaker to be something of a wit. Goethe felt right at home in this humble dwelling. On his return to the lodgings for lunch after his morning outing to the Dresden gallery, he writes that he could hardly believe his eyes: a scene from a painting by the 17th-century Dutch painter Adriaen Ostade, a scene so perfect that one could imagine it hanging in the gallery itself.
Stellung der Gegenstände, Licht, Schatten, bräunlicher Teint des Ganzen, magische Haltung, alles, was man in jenen Bildern bewundert, sah ich hier in der Wirklichkeit.
(If necessary, cut and past German quote in Google Translate.)
It’s not known which painting of Ostade Goethe actually saw. Dresden today has lots of paintings by the artist, but I liked the one above, which seems to reflect what might have appealed to Goethe, as per Wikipedia: Ostade “is distinguished from his rivals by a more general use of light and shade, especially a greater concentration of light on a small surface in contrast with a broad expanse of gloom.”
That evening, on returning home near midnight, making his way to his quarters, Goethe again describes the setting in reference to another Netherlandic painter, Godfried Schalken:
Die Türen fand ich unverschlossen, alles war zu Bette, und eine Lampe erleuchtete den enghäuslichen Zustand, wo denn mein immer mehr geübtes Auge sogleich das schönste Bild von Schalcken erblickte, von dem ich mich nicht losmachen konnte, so daß es mir allen Schlaf vertrieb.
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| Godfried Schalken, Girl Reading a Letter |
Again, Wikipedia offers information on the painter that resonates with Goethe's description: "a Dutch genre and portrait painter. He was noted for his mastery in reproducing the effect of candlelight," Further, Schalcken specialized in scenes by candlelight."
In a certain way, this coincidence of Goethe’s visit to the magnificent galleries in Dresden with his meeting with a humble craftsman reminds me of certain experiences I had in my youth when I traveled in Europe and later in Asia. Being a student, I did not have a lot of money and did not stay in grand hotels. At the time of those travels, however, the exchange rate was favorable to Americans. It really was the era when you carried in your backpack a copy of Paris on $5 a day or Asia on a Shoestring. Those days of course are long over, but I often stayed in lodgings like that of the shoemaker and had experiences similar to that of Goethe in Dresden.
It has taken me a while to arrive finally at the idea that initiated this blogpost, namely, that I could not help being struck by the difference between Goethe’s view of a craftsman’s life and circumstances from the experience of Anton Reiser, who spent a couple of years of a really awful apprenticeship with another craftsman, a milliner (Hutmacher) in Braunschweig named Lobenstein. Goethe of course knew Karl Philipp Moritz’s novel, having read portions of it in Rome when he first met Moritz. The description of Reiser’s apprenticeship is contained in the first part of the novel. It is impossible to trace every influence on an artist or a writer, for instance, whether Anton Reiser’s experience inspired the creation of the shoemaker in Dresden. It is not, however, the shoemaker episode itself that makes me suspect a relationship between Goethe’s account here and the "person" of Anton Reiser. As I wrote above, this will be a two-parter, and I will attempt in the next post to strengthen the connection between the episode in Goethe's autobiography and Anton Reiser.
Image credits: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister