Isidor Kaufmann

Wilhelm Kux, by 1931

Vienna, Oberen Belvedere, Das Wiener Sittenbild des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1931, no. 91

Vienna, Viennese Kunstlerhaus, 138, no. 1346

Das Wiener Sittenbild des 19. Jahrhunderts, Vienna 1931, cat. no. 91.

This acutely observed and painstakingly painted genre scene by Hungarian artist Isidor Kaufmann ranks among his best secular subjects. Similar to the Munich School's Franz von Defregger's Tyrolean peasants, Eduard Grützner's drink-loving monks, and Carl Spitzweg's whimsical peasants, Kaufmann's oeuvre contains a number of stock character types. In the present work, a well dressed seemingly disgruntled older gentleman sits in the office or study of the standing gentleman, gesticulating mid-sentence, with a feather tucked behind his ear and his hat resting on a sideboard beneath a map of France on the far wall. Sheets of paper strewn on the floor in the foreground suggest a disagreement of some kind.

Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s, Kaufmann's small works of smooth surface and incredible detail compelled viewers to closely examine these narrative scenes, inspired in part by the traditions of seventeenth century Dutch masters and then-contemporary French artist Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier's compositions.