Der abgefangene Liebesbrief

Carl Spitzweg was the great comedian of Biedermeier Germany, the decades after 1815 when public life was tightly policed and painters turned inward to small domestic dramas. Here the drama is a student, you can tell by his cap, leaning from an upper window and lowering a sealed love letter on a thread toward the open casement below. The young woman he means it for is bent over her needlework, oblivious. But an older woman, an aunt or a chaperone, has spotted the letter dropping past and freezes with her mouth open. Spitzweg loads the corners with jokes, down to a pair of doves cooing on a ledge while the human courtship goes wrong. He painted this around 1860, by then a self-taught former pharmacist who had made a whole career out of these gentle mishaps.