Lot 2555 Dα

After his training until the master class at the Berlin and Düsseldorf Art Academies from 1829-1840, Louis Ammy Blanc worked for a time as court painter in Hanover and Darmstadt, but Düsseldorf remained the focus of his career until the end of his life. He first found success as a genre painter, but over time he began increasingly to paint motifs based on the works of Goethe and Uhland in the tradition of Düsseldorf's "literary painting" style. Scenes from mythology such as the present work only began to appear in his later oeuvre.
At the beginning of this story, found in Ovid's "Metamorphoses", it is told that the young lovers Pyramus and Thisbe are not allowed to see each other because of their parents' rivalry. This work depicts Thisbe standing by the wall that separated the two families' houses, and between the ivy tendrils we see the crack through which she was able to speak to Pyramus.