Oil painting, '"Good Morning Mamma!": A Mother and Child Caressing', Samuel Baruch Halle, German school, 1859

A young woman wearing an interior dress with lace and a red ribbon is embraacing a child in a white nightshirt; dark background.

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886

Exhibited at the British Institution in 1859 no.139 priced at 100 guineas

This painting is a fine example of Halle's genre scenes. It depicts a young child embracing his mother in 19th-century interior dress. Both figures are silhouetted against a dark background and illuminated from the upper right, which provides the pictures with a sense of intimacy and enhance the domestic sphere in which such scene takes place.

This kind of imagery is typical of the Biedermeier art milieu, which favoured such genre scnes with a high degree of finish while little attempt is made at deeper psychological exploration. The subject matter in indeed dominated here by the peaceful and charming character of the scene.

The year of the execution of the painting, Halle exhibited four works at the Royal Academy, London, and two others the following year but it is impossible to assess if the present picture was one of them even C.M. kauffmann suggested the present painting may be identified with Mother's Pet, exhibited in 1860. Comparable compositions include Grace before Meal, dated 1859, sold G.E. Sworder & Sons, Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex, 24 Nov. 2009, lot 555 and Mother Nursing her Child, sold Dorotheum, Vienna, lot 206.

These pictures attracted patrons and collectors of the 19th-century along with Realist works. 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.

Samuel Barush Halle (1824-1889) was born in Frankfurt am Main where he trained at the school of art. He moved to Antwerp in 1842 to study under Gustav Wappers (1803-1874). He later moved to Paris where he died in 1889, after being naturalised as French citizen.

This painting is a fine example of Halle's intimate genre scenes. It depicts a young child embracing his mother in 19th-century interior dress. This kind of pictures is typical of the Biedermeier movement that develop in the 19th century in Germanic Europe.

1046-1886