This work goes back to Werner’s time with a support command in Versailles twenty-four years earlier during the Franco-Prussian War. Protected by the court and specially chosen as the iconographer of the birth of the German nation as a state, Werner, who had been the director of the Art Academy since 1875, had meanwhile become the Art Pope of Germany in the late 1890s and provoked bitter opposition both from founders of the Secession and from dealers in international art. The picture shows German soldiers making music in the salon of an elegant chateau that they have requisitioned in Brunoy. Werner, like the Landeskunstkommission (Regional Art Commission), which purchased this work the same year it was painted, was well aware of the popularity of war pictures. But what becomes clear with hindsight is that the painting provides more than emotional relief: unintentionally, the discrepancy between the fine Second Empire interior and the rough behavior of the officers, including their attempts to be cultivated, in fact makes relative the victors’ pathos.
Anton von Werner (Frankfurt, May 9, 1843 - January 4, 1915) was a German painter. After having won a travelling scholarship upon the exhibition of his early works, he visited Paris in 1867, and afterwards Italy, where he remained for some time. On his return, he received several state commissions. His career reached its peak when he became, in 1875, director of the Academy in Berlin.
[National Gallery, Berlin - Oil on canvas, 120 x 158 cm]
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