El gabinete de lectura

In 1843, when Hasenclever painted these middle-class men bent over their newspapers, the German states were tightening the screws on exactly that activity. Public reading rooms had become places where citizens gathered to argue over the press and pass around liberal ideas, and the authorities were watching. That same year the government suppressed the Rheinische Zeitung, an outspoken Cologne paper, in the crackdown that ran through the Rhineland. Hasenclever, who worked in nearby Duesseldorf, had already made a small career of scenes like this, of politicians and newspaper readers. He plays it partly for comedy, the absorbed faces and the fussy postures, but the joke had an edge in a decade sliding toward the revolutions of 1848. He painted more than one version of the subject.