Gnome watching railway train
Carl Spitzweg, 1848
This small painting by Carl Spitzweg, dated 1848, shows a gnome with a long grey beard and a reddish-brown hood peering from the mouth of a cave, sheltered by rock and tangled roots. Lit by sunlight and set against the glow, he stands with his arms behind his back, gazing into the valley below: a train runs to the left, its locomotive chimney releasing steam, while in the distance a village with its church gleams under white clouds. The composition echoes the elevated viewpoint used by Romantic painters such as Friedrich, Constable and Delacroix. Yet the tone differs: the gnome reads as a humorous, self-ironic figure, a guardian of an older world watching modernity pass by from his refuge. The painting was made on the lid of a cigar box, only a decade after the first German railway line opened, which deepens its reading as a comment on technological change. Here, the idyllic surface is undercut by irony.
- Painter
- Carl Spitzweg
- Date
- 1848
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 24 × 15 cm
- Depicts
- gnome, train
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