For most of history, a painting of a poor man was made for someone rich enough to walk past him in the street. On this page, a beggar boy who cannot speak holds up a note that asks for alms in Latin. A century later, an artist carried a painting of a poor poet out of a Berlin museum to ask who it really belonged to.
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How These Were Chosen
Charity was a Christian duty, so a beggar in a painting could carry a sermon without a single saint in the frame. Painters also liked what the poor gave the brush: rags, bare feet, worn hands, the marks of age and weather.
Each picture here puts the poor person at its center, as the subject of the scene and never a figure at the edge of a crowd. Only paintings count, so engravings and the pages of illustrated papers are left out, even when a painting grew from one.
Several painters went further and gave their poorest sitters the formats of the powerful: the full-length portrait, the huge canvas kept for history painting, the calm profile of a magistrate. Others kept them at the scale of an attic or a railway bench.
12. Carl Spitzweg, The Poor Poet (1839)
An open umbrella hangs from the rafters of an attic, right where the rain comes through the roof. Below it, a poor poet lies in bed under a quilt, a nightcap on his head and a quill between his teeth. Carl Spitzweg made this small canvas in Munich in 1839.
Spitzweg was not a trained artist. He was a Munich pharmacist who had taught himself to paint, and here he turns poverty into comedy, built entirely out of objects.
Each object shows how little the poet has. The stove is cold, and the bundle of paper by its door is usually read as his own writing, waiting to be burned for heat. His raised hand, thumb pressed to finger, counts out the beat of a line of verse marked on the plaster beside the bed. In a room where nothing works, the umbrella is the only thing still doing its job, and it has had to come indoors to do it.
Spitzweg painted three versions that year, and the one in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie was pulled into a quarrel about who art belongs to. In 1976 the performance artist Ulay took it off the museum wall and hung it in the Kreuzberg flat of a Turkish immigrant family, to ask who a painting of a poor man was really for.
The canvas was back in the museum within hours. Thirteen years later thieves took it again, this time from Charlottenburg Palace, and nobody has seen it since.
At a Glance
Artist: Carl Spitzweg (1808 to 1885)
Painted: 1839
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 36.2 × 44.6 cm (14.3 × 17.6 in)
Where to see it: Sammlung Schack, Munich (Bavarian State Painting Collections)
About This Painting
Is The Poor Poet a Biedermeier painting?
Yes. Biedermeier is the name for the cozy, domestic culture of German-speaking Europe between about 1815 and 1848, and Spitzweg is one of its best known painters. The Poor Poet gently mocks the Romantic idea of the starving genius.
11. Luke Fildes, Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward (1874)
Snow covers the pavement outside a London police station, where a line of homeless men, women and children waits for a ticket to a casual ward, the part of the workhouse where the destitute could sleep one night and pay for the bed with hard labor the next morning.
When Luke Fildes showed the canvas at the Royal Academy in 1874, the crowd in front of it grew so thick that a rail went up to hold people back. Londoners had already met these faces five years earlier, somewhere far cheaper than the Academy.