Oil painting, 'Count Eberhard Cutting the Table-Cloth', Carl Johann Lasch, German school, 1847

In a dining room with a guard in armour in the background, two men in medieval costumes sit around a table; the older bearded man cuts the tablecloth with a knife while the other is looking down at a dog resting on the ground.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend

Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, listed in the 1868 post-mortem register of the contents of his house in London (V&A R/F MA/1/T1181) in the library as 'Oil on Canvas. The separation or Rhine quarrel between a Rhine Baron and his son. By C. Lasch. In frame. Signed. German. Dated 1847'; bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868.

Historical significance: This painting is a fine example of the Romantic imagery developed in Western Europe during the 19th century and in Dusseldorf in particular which, by 1850, had replaced the Dresden Akademie as the favoured place in Germany to study art.
Lasch essentially produced portraits and genre scenes and relatively few history paintings such as the present one. This rare subject matter scene appears on two paintings by Ary Scheffer: Count Eberhard of Würtemberg cutting the Table-cloth between himself and his Son and Count Eberhard by the dead Body of his Son, both Municipal Museum, Dordrecht.
This type of works was quite popular with collectors and this painting may have been bought by Townshend, who was an erudite man of letter, because of the subject matter.

The word Romanticism derived from the medieval term 'romance' and was first used by the German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel to label a wider cultural movement beginning with the late 18th and ending towards the mid 19th century. Romanticism started first in Western Europe as a literary and philosophical movement and only gradually involved the other arts, explicitly around 1800. Romantic artists were fascinated by nature they interpreted as a mirror of the mind. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious and the occult. The interest in the exotic and the non-Western, illustrated in France by such a painter as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), as well as the medieval revival, witnessed in England by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), are perhaps the most identifiable parts of Romanticism. It is really in the Post-Napoleonic period that this movement gained ascendancy. Its greatest proponents were among others Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) and François-René de Chateaubriant (1768-1848) in France, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) in England, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in Germany. In the visual arts, it was largely played out by 1850, but in music it persists for another generation.

Carl Johann Lasch (1822-1888) was born in Leipzig. He was the pupil of Beudemann at the Academy in Dresden and of Schnorr and Kaultach in Munich. After travelling to Vienna, St Petersburg, Moscow and Paris, he settled in Munich in 1860, where he became a teacher.

This painting is a fine example of the history paintings produced by the Munich school, one the two main artistic centres in 19th-century Germany. The subject matter, the Count Eberhard II, Count of Württemberg (1315-92) cutting the table-cloth to show his anger with his son, was taken from a ballad by the poet Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862). The interest in ethnic origins and the medieval era is typical of the Romantic imagery that developed in Western Europe from the 1830s.

1542-1869