Oil painting entitled 'The Dispute' by Gotthardt Johann Kuehl. German School, 1881.

The scene depicts six men in 18th century costume in disputation around a table. On the table are a decanter and glasses, and crumpled papers lie on the floor.At the extreme left are a red armchair and a brown screen. On the whitewashed wall in the background are a mirror, behind which is wedged a fan, a shelf with books, and a print or picture.

Bequeathed by Henry Louis Florence

Thomas M'Lean, art dealer, 7 Haymarket, London (label on back); Henry L. Florence, by whom bequeathed 1916

Historical significance: Especially during the 1870s Kuehl painted a number of historicising costume pieces with figures in eighteenth century dress. This subject matter, and the broad and broken brushwork, suggesting extensive use of the palette knife, indicate his early debt to the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny (1838-1874). Such brushwork recalls the handling of the great French genre painter Jean-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) and that of Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884), who was subsequently a major influence on Kuehl. In 1881, the year this work was painted, Kuehl wrote to the art historian Richard Graul that he was disgusted by costume pieces and would in future go direct to the life. (Gerkens & Zimmermann, Gotthardt Kuehl 1859-1915, Leipzig 1993, p.171). Thereafter, he concentrated on scenes from contemporary everyday working life.

Gotthardt Kuehl (1850-1915) was born in Lübeck, and studied at the Academies of Dresden and Munich. From 1878 until 1889 he lived in Paris, where he came under the influence of the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny (1838-1874) and later of Manet and Bastien Lepage. On trips to Holland he studied the Dutch 17th century painters, especially Vermeer and de Hooch. In 1889 he settled in Dresden, where he became professor at the Academy in 1895. There, between 1897-1912 he organised a series of major art exhibitions and introduced the work of the French Impressionists to Dreden.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the enduring popularity especially of Dutch, Flemish, Spanish and French genre paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fostered a taste throughout Europe both for realist paintings of everyday life and for more idealised historicising 'costume pieces' representing domestic subjects set in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.

P.52-1917