Josef Danhauser's Game of Chess

Series Summary

Painting and drawing is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions, and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting and drawing as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, we have records of men and women making graphic representations of their world, showing their understanding and their curiosity. Understanding art requires studying great artists of the past. In this free fine art video series, an art historian discusses Biedermeier and post-impressionist artists whose work now resides in Vienna. Learn about artists such as Josef Danhauser, Friedrich Ritter von Amerling, Max Liebermann, and Vincent van Gogh. Study their artistic styles to learn about the times in which they worked. Learn about important art movements using this art history series as a guide.

Video Transcript

"So the paintings, the painting from Josef Danhauser, the title is Game of Chess is from 1839. It's a very interesting painting from the period of Biedermeier, which was all really concentrated in Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. It was in the first part of the 19th Century and it had a big difference to Neo-Classicism which was at the last part of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th Century. It was dealing rather with the private life. The name of the period, Biedermeier comes from a kind of a mocking word for a citizen, a so called "little citizen" and so that's why we can feel that the main topics, the main themes which were displayed, painted by the artist at that time were especially portraits, genre scenes or some historical scenes as well. Danhauser, he was working in Vienna. Vienna was the center of this, of this style. He was very important because in his life we can recognize that Biedermeier was not only a painting, a kind of a style of painting, but also for everyday life, stuff like furniture or, or, or other applied arts. Because the Danhauser family had a kind of furniture workshop and he was working in this as well. But we can see on that picture that he was an expert of portrait painting. The other thing which is important about this painting that it was a real story, a real happening, which happened a year before as he painted. In 1838 there was a special chess game between the banker Escales and a Hungarian noble woman. And they played because the lover of the noble woman had a big debt to this banker and that was the way she could gain back the debts. At the end, she won the game against the banker. Not only this living personalities, we can see on that pictures but other famous composers, like for example, Franz Liszt or piano players from that time in Vienna. What is special about this group portrait, it can be called a kind of a group portrait because the figures on the pictures are very accurate and detailed and the change of the portrait are very, how to say, very rich in details."