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Lot Essay
The Austrian painter Johann Hamza is amongst the most gifted 19th Century genre artists who showed a profound fascination with pictures set in the later eighteenth century. As M. Poltimore and P. Hook commented, 'The eighteenth century assumed an almost mythic significance for bourgeois Europe of a hundred years later. The Goncourt rediscovered it and elevated it into an Arcadia on a par with antiquity. And indeed its attractions were manifold. It was the age of elegance... The artist G.A. Storey claimed: "There can be no doubt that want of taste in dress and other surroundings often obliges the artist to present his fancies in the costumes of periods when articles of clothing were in themselves works of art...". Taste, elegance and luxury, then, were keynotes in the pictorial reintepretation of the age which artists undertook a hundred years later' (Popular 19th Century Painting, London, 1986, p. 295).
Like his colleagues Madou, Reggianini and Soulacroix, Hamza dwelt lovingly on the chromatic richness of the ladies' and gentlemen's dresses, which faithfully portray the fashions and trends of the late 18th Century. The depiction of the endless game of seduction was at the centre of Hamza's preoccupations, offering the artist the opportunity of creating a unique gallery of sophisticated couples in romantic conversations, and young gentlemen dressed in sumptuous costumes. In the present picture, Hamza muses on the contrast between the simple set - the cosy interior of a rural inn - and the elegant attire of the figures, the men all wearing collarless, unfastened coats, waistcoats, breeches and three-cornered hats (following the male mode established in the middle years of the reign of Louis XIV), whilst the women are dressed in embroidered closed robes, with tight bodices and characteristic 18th Century sleeves, showing a ruffle of lace below the elbow.
Die Schauspieler is the artist's most accomplished idealisation of the 18th Century as a 'golden age of simple cosiness, rural prosperity, and picturesque innocence... gone forever, and therefore more tantalisingly attractive' (ibidem, p. 296).
Like his colleagues Madou, Reggianini and Soulacroix, Hamza dwelt lovingly on the chromatic richness of the ladies' and gentlemen's dresses, which faithfully portray the fashions and trends of the late 18th Century. The depiction of the endless game of seduction was at the centre of Hamza's preoccupations, offering the artist the opportunity of creating a unique gallery of sophisticated couples in romantic conversations, and young gentlemen dressed in sumptuous costumes. In the present picture, Hamza muses on the contrast between the simple set - the cosy interior of a rural inn - and the elegant attire of the figures, the men all wearing collarless, unfastened coats, waistcoats, breeches and three-cornered hats (following the male mode established in the middle years of the reign of Louis XIV), whilst the women are dressed in embroidered closed robes, with tight bodices and characteristic 18th Century sleeves, showing a ruffle of lace below the elbow.
Die Schauspieler is the artist's most accomplished idealisation of the 18th Century as a 'golden age of simple cosiness, rural prosperity, and picturesque innocence... gone forever, and therefore more tantalisingly attractive' (ibidem, p. 296).