19th century German miniature

19th century German miniature.
"The smoker".
Painting on oval porcelain plate.
Without signature.
Label on the back.
Measurements: 8,5 x 6,7 cm.

The miniature in tender is out of the characteristic nineteenth-century portraits in which the portrayed is captured with great verism and diplomacy. Instead, we find ourselves in front of a smoker whose aesthetics are influenced by 17th century Dutch painting.

The genre painting in Flanders, as in Holland, contained a moral lesson, sometimes barely hidden. Picturesque and satirical scenes, with rough peasants indulging in pleasures, as well as scenes of citizens conversing or dancing, have long been recognized as negative moral examples that also appear as metaphors in the popular moralizing literature of the time. In the Netherlands people were familiar with the books of moralizing purposes by Roemer Visscher, Jacob Cats and others, as is evident from the artistic motifs derived from them. Thus, genre painting in 17th century Flanders produces a rather conservative impression. The Southern Netherlands did not really cultivate the more restrained and seemingly realistic but in fact emblematic images of contemporary domestic life that we find in Dutch paintings of the second half of the seventeenth century. However, within the Flemish school of the seventeenth century, in the subjects of customs, an important novelty will appear, the so-called tavern painting. This is a genre created by Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638) and David Teniers (1610-1690), characterized by depicting tavern interiors populated by colorful and vulgar characters, often even grotesque in the case of Brouwer, bordering on caricature. This type of scenes, violent in the case of Brouwer and his followers or more cheerful, in the case of the school of Teniers, enjoyed great diffusion, and even spread to Holland, creating a new genre there as well. In this type of painting the characters will be the absolute protagonists, and more especially their faces and expressions. They are also works derived from naturalism, worked in reduced chromatisms, around earthy colors, ochers, carmines, etc.