Johann Peter Hasenclever

In spring 1843 the Prussian authorities shut down the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal Cologne paper edited until shortly before by the young Karl Marx. That same year Johann Peter Hasenclever, a genre painter in Düsseldorf, finished The Reading Room, now in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It shows middle-class men absorbed in the newspapers of a reading club, lit by a candle at the back and by a modern lamp placed right at the centre of the picture.

Clubs like this were where Germans of the Vormärz, the tense years before the revolution of 1848, read and argued over the news, and Hasenclever had been painting newspaper readers since the 1830s. He had made his name with humour. Wilhelm von Schadow, director of the Düsseldorf Academy, doubted his talent, and Hasenclever left after two years. His scenes from the Jobsiade, a comic poem about an eternal student who ends up a night watchman, then proved a success, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria bought one in 1840.

In 1848 the satire turned political. Hasenclever served as deputy commander of a democratic civic guard, helped bring about the Malkasten, a new artists' society in Düsseldorf, and painted Workers before the Magistrate, a delegation of labourers confronting the city councillors. He died of typhus in Düsseldorf in 1853, at the age of 43.