Artist: Peter Baumgartner (German, 1834 -1911)

Title: The Auction Sale

Date: 1863

Medium: oil on canvas, 48 7/8 x 62"

About the Art
The Auction Sale is one of the most complex narrative paintings among
the Tweed museum's European holdings. A host of characters from
various levels of mid-nineteenth German society are gathered in the
attic studio of an artist, presumed to be recently deceased. The
painting depicts a fleeting moment in time, which nonetheless speaks
volumes about the players inhabiting the stage-like space and the
society in which they live. While his early works were often drawn from
folklore and fairy tales, Baumgartner's mature paintings are marked by
ironic and sometimes humorous juxtapositions of the sacred and the
profane, all the while based on accounts of everyday Bavarian life. The
activity of this painting revolves around a large central image of the
Immaculate Conception, before which a mother and daughter stand in awe.
In sharp contrast and physically removed from this sacred reference,
two men at the left foreground study a sketch of a female nude, and
another, behind them, curiously lifts the drapery from an artist's
mannequin. In the painting's right corner a clerk records the auction's
sales, while nearby a peasant couple and their son try on a pair of
used boots. Positioning such disparate activities in a common space,
Baumgartner comments with humor and irony on the timeless struggle
between earthly, artistic and spiritual concerns.