Oil on canvas. Signed on the stool in the lower left margin. 38 x 49 cm.

• Schlesinger was one of the most important representatives of the Düsseldorf School, which revived genre painting in the late 19th century.
• Alongside great genre artists like Ludwig Knaus, Benjamin Vautier, and Franz Defregger, Schlesinger's works are characterized by their poetic-descriptive, humoristic narrative appeal.

Private collection, Germany

Felix Schlesinger is considered an important genre painter of the 19th century. He put particular focus on the display of innocent and idyllic childhood life. From the 1860s, he mainly showed scenes of small farm children playing or with farm animals. In addition to landscape painting, the Düsseldorf School in particular also helped genre painting to regain popularity from the 1840s on. After he had studied in his hometown of Hamburg and then in Antwerp. Schlesinger also spent some time in Düsseldorf before he went to Paris. From 1861 to 1863 he briefly worked in Frankfurt before finally settling in Munich as a genre painter. The representatives of Düsseldorf and Munich painting, such as Ludwig Knaus, Benjamin Vautier and Franz Defregger, were particularly influential in this period. While Gustave Courbet caused scandals with his anti-academic and programmatic realism in the first half of the 19th century, this realism, with its poetic-descriptive, humorous narrative power, became the means of expression in academic genre painting. A sentimentalist glorification, stylization and arrangement of such everyday scenes, however, served to emphasize the "artificial" - that is the artistic - character of the representation, which should in no way convey that it is simply a copy of reality. As early as in the 17th century in the Netherlands, everyday things had become worthy of being displayed, with the viewer reading mostly moralizing implications or general statements about human behavior. The genre painting of the 19th century primarily concentrated on the sentimental depiction of rural or bourgeois life, often focusing on the family, in which all age groups found representation as a characteristic of life. Motifs with children, as portrayed by Schlesinger, were particularly popular. They were sought after internationally as early as in the 19th century and were particularly popular in England and America. [KT]