The Conscript’s Farewell, 1854

A heart-rendering scene is taking place in a farmhouse parlor: A young man, having been called up for military service, is surrounded by his family bidding him farewell. In his 1854 painting The Conscript’s Farewell, the Biedermeier painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865) conveyed the emotionally charged atmosphere of the moment. Though the parents are trying to reassure the boy – the father clasping the son’s hand and shoulder, the mother blessing him –, the siblings hold out their arms imploringly, while crying figures, populating the scene all the way to the back of the room, simply cannot watch. Waldmüller skillfully heightened the tense atmosphere through the lack of emotion of the figures in the foreground: to the left, a young brother’s striding movement announces his departure from the scene, in the center a cat is licking milk from the floor and to the right, the youngest sibling watches the goings-on without understanding them. The conscript, too, does not seem to grasp what is happening to him.

MK, 2021