The Decameron
Franz Xaver Winterhalter
Hans Thoma the museum director
A crowd-puller
“It is hardly possible to concentrate a greater quality of grace and beauty, spirited elegance and refinement, in such a small space.”
Commonalities
In purchasing works for the Kunsthalle, Hans Thoma favoured artists and paintings with some form of regional connection – a criterion certainly met by Franz Xaver Winterhalter.
Over twenty years older than Thoma, Winterhalter was born in the Black Forest in Menzenschwand, close to Thoma’s birthplace of Bernau. The two artists were even distantly related, since Winterhalter’s mother was a cousin of Thoma’s grandfather.
After training in Freiburg and Munich, Winterhalter moved to Karlsruhe in 1830. There, he became the drawing teacher and portrait painter of the Grand Duke’s family. From 1832 to 1834, he travelled through Italy.
On his return to Karlsruhe, the Grand Duke appointed him as his court painter, a position he retained until his death. In 1834, Winterhalter moved to Paris. From the following year, he regularly exhibited works in the annual Paris Salon exhibition.
Career
Winterhalter also achieved his artistic breakthrough in Paris. Thanks not least to the success of his Decameron at the Salon exhibition in 1837, he quickly became one of the most sought-after portrait painters, receiving commissions to paint likenesses of the higher nobility and royal dynasties across Europe.
This sphere of activity was curtailed by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. He then returned to Karlsruhe where he found a new source of work in portraiture for the prosperous and growing middle classes. Even towards the end of his life, he was travelling to Frankfurt to paint portraits of the city’s leading banking families.
A chance purchase
The Decameron on show here was purchased for a significant sum in late April 1914, bought by the Badische Kunstverein (Baden Art Association) for the Kunsthalle. However, this is not the large version that Winterhalter exhibited in the 1837 Paris Salon, but a replica approximately half the size.
When this work was acquired, it seems to have been quite familiar to the art-loving public, possibly due to its wide dissemination in etchings or prints by artists such as Alexis François Girard or A. Martinet. An announcement in the Cicerone arts magazine in 1915 also highlights the work’s reputation. The previous year, it stated, the Grand Ducal Gallery had acquired “the well-known ‘Decameron’ after Boccaccio painted in Paris in 1837 by the Black Forest painter of princes F. X. Winterhalter, so celebrated in his own day”.
10 x 10 – Stories from pandemic days
The painting’s subject comes from a book still famous today – the Decameron by the Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, born in 1313. His Decameron recounts the story of seven young noblewomen and three young noblemen who take shelter for ten days in a country villa near Florence to escape an outbreak of the Black Death in the city. The title of Boccaccio’s book derives from the Greek for ten (“deka”) and for day (“hemera”).
In their seclusion, the characters pass the time by inventing stories every day on particular subjects and telling them in turn. Since each of them recounts a story every single day, the Decameron comprises 10 x 10 stories, or 100 in total. Through this book, his major work, Boccaccio is regarded as the founder of the European narrative prose tradition.
Since Boccaccio began writing his Decameron shortly after a plague epidemic had raged across Italy in 1348, his collection of stories was highly topical. But it was only widely read more than 100 years later, after the invention of metal movable-type printing in Europe.
From text to image
Following his literary model, Winterhalter portrays seven women and three men. Some are dressed in fashionable contemporary styles, while other are wearing fantasy garments. The palace setting and city silhouette in the background evoke a location close to Florence. The central figure’s laurel wreath signifies it is her turn to recount her story.
While most are listening, the young man lying on the ground seems more interested in the young woman next to him.
Enthusiastic critics
When Winterhalter exhibited the large version of this painting in the Paris Salon in 1837, it was not only awarded a special prize, but also highly praised by critics in both France and Germany.
L’Artiste, a French weekly review, reported that the painting was the most successful work in the Paris Salon that year. A German critic writing of the 1837 Salon commented on Winterhalter’s Decameron:
“It is hardly possible to concentrate a greater quality of grace and beauty, spirited elegance and refinement, in such a small space. Here and there, a little affectation may be in evidence; some female heads, incidentally wonderfully beautiful, may recall English prints; the young man in the red hose, half of whose figure is painted in half-tints, could not be imagined more ideally; all the poses of the figures are natural, and the ladies sitting on the lawn all find a suitable opportunity to allow, in the most unaffected manner, the world to admire their delicately shaped feet; moreover, they are clothed in such romantic and imaginative, yet always tasteful, costumes that no one would wish to take their eyes from these pleasing visions.”
Who’s got the picture?
What happened to the large version of this painting? Even during the 1837 Paris Salon, it was bought by Jacques Paturle, a wealthy art collector and politician. His collection was auctioned in Paris on 28 February 1872.
In 2009, after the painting passed through the hands of a number of owners, it was acquired from Bernheimer Fine Old Masters, Munich, by Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein. Today, Winterhalter’s painting is on show in the Liechtenstein City Palace.
The decision to purchase the smaller version of Decameron for the Karlsruhe Kunsthalle in 1914, just a few months before the start of the First World War, may have been informed by a desire to pay a tribute both to the renowned and multi-faceted history of the large original and to Winterhalter himself who, with his career as a painter of European royalty, was an important artist for Karlsruhe.
Basic data
| Title | The Decameron |
|---|---|
| Artist | Franz Xaver Winterhalter |
| Date | 1837 |
| Measurements Plastic | H 81.5cm W 116cm |
| Material | Oil on canvas |