Mother with Children Returning Home, 1863

The oil painting Mother with Children Returning Home by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865) seeks to produce a great effect in the viewer: The very fact that beholders have to think of themselves as observing the scene from within a dark, squalid cottage, whose open door frames the central theme and reveals a brightly lit landscape, invests the rendering with a surprising vantage point. Surrounded by children competing for her attention, laden with hay and her youngest child on her back, the mother is crossing the threshold. She is coming directly towards the beholder, a smile on her lips, while the well-nourished child above her head is also smiling and looking straight at us. Intended for wealthy city dwellers, Waldmüller’s painting, which was created in the last phase of Biedermeier painting in 1863, shows a pleasing idealization of the rural population’s hardships which has to be mistrusted.

MK, 2021