Oil on canvas, 'The Vesper Bell: The Young Reapers', Friedrich Dürck, German school, 1848

A young girl, her hair plaited around her head, kneels next to an even younger boy who sits cross-legged on the ground. The girl holds a scythe in her over-lapping hands, the boy a wooden flute in his right hand and a hunk of bread in his left. They are surrounded by grass and wild flowers. Mountains in the distance.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868

Historical significance: This painting is a fine example of Dürck's genre scenes. It depicts two young children in a majestic landscape dominated by the Alps in the background. This kind of imagery draws upon the Romantic vision of a spiritualised nature developed in Germany in the 1820s and 1830s. However unlike Romanticism which placed nature as a mirror of the mind, little attempt was made at deeper psychological exploration. The subject matter in indeed dominated here by the peaceful and charming character of the scene.
These pictures attracted patrons and collectors of the 19th-century along with Realist works. This painting was bequeathed by the Rev. Townshend whose collection is a fine example of collectors' taste of the preceding century. The museum owns the most important group of Biedermeier pictures in the U.K.

The term 'Biedermeier' refers to bourgeois life and art in Germanic Europe, an extensive area embracing such cities as Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna and Prague, from 1815 (the Congress of Vienna) to the revolutions of 1848. Biedermeier painters were ideologically opposed to academic and religious painting and favoured such subject matter as portraits, landscapes and genre scenes, with still-lifes, especially of flowers. They share a similar technique in the use of separate, clear tones and a high degree of finish, reminiscent of Neo-Classicism while they tend to convey a greater sentimentality. By the 1880s, the influence of this artistic movement was on the wane and was even used pejoratively to characterize the reactionary bourgeois elements in society, which remained quite indifferent to social problems and cultivated a sense of order and sobriety, especially in the private sphere and the domestic realm.

Friedrich Dürck (1809-1884) was born in Leipzig where he was a pupil of Hans Veit Friedrich Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1764-1841). He went to Munich Academy in 1834 and worked later as a court painter for the courts of Sweden (1849) and Austria (1854). He later specialised in genre scenes of childhood.

This painting is a fine example of Dürck's childhood scenes. It depicts two young children in Helvetic dress with the mountains Alps in the distance. This calm and peaceful scene combines a revived interest of nature, characteristic of the 19th-centry art and the taste for anecdotic genre paintings. This kind of pictures is typical of the Biedermeier movement that develop in the 19th century in Germanic Europe.

1538-1869