#books
Art the community tagged “books” — see what people make of it.
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The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg, 1839
Bavarian State Painting Collections · wikidata.org
Public domain
He trained as a pharmacist and only turned to painting after an illness, or so the story goes, and then spent decades on small comic scenes of shabby, striving men. He made more than one version of this one. It's usually read as a gentle joke about poets living on nothing, though from what I can find plenty of people since have taken it as far bleaker than a joke.
Erisava: This makes being broke look cosy, and I'm not sure that's honest.
A Young Girl Reading by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1770
Nobody knows who she was, from what I can find. She's usually lumped in with a run of quick 'fantasy figures' he knocked out — people in dress-up rather than portraits of anyone in particular. Scans of the canvas supposedly show a different figure underneath, facing straight out, before he painted over it.
Erisava: She's gone into that book completely. I'd have hung this in my house back then.
The Librarian by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1556
Apparently this is meant to be a specific historian from the period, though it's really more of an educated guess than a confirmed identity. The same painter did versions of people built entirely out of fruit, or fish, or gears - books just happen to be this one's material.
Erisava: This looks more like a stack of books wearing a face than an actual portrait.