Lot 2383 Dα

With a label on the stretcher with a printed inscription "Ferdinand Brütt" and handwritten addition: ""Die verrätherische Studie" / von [printed: Ferdinand Brütt] / Weimar."
The sale of the "Verräterische Studie" marks the reappearance of one of the earliest major works by the Hamburg painter Ferdinand Brütt, the whereabouts of which remained unknown for many years. The composition was mainly known from early publications in the "Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung" of 1877 and the magazine "Meisterwerke der Holzschneidekunst" (Masterpieces of Woodcutting) of 1879, where the content of the picture was already explained: according to this, the imperious farmer sees a sketch depicting his daughter in an interior. The fact that the daughter, who is sitting dismayed on a chair, and the painter of the sketch, who has already fled the room, are having an affair is revealed to the strict father by the "Telltale Study" left behind. This early genre scene by Brütts shows "the decisive moment of a narrative and encourages the viewer to add what happened before or what will follow afterwards" (Alexander Bastek, in exhib. cat., op. cit., p. 24). The painting was created during the young artist's training in Weimar, when, after an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Hamburg, he was a student of the Belgian history painter Ferdinand Pauwels at the Grand Ducal School of Art from 1870.
In the course of the important Brütt exhibition at the Museum Giersch in Frankfurt in 2007, which had come to the attention of the owner of the "Telltale Study", the painting could be shown there for the first time, whereby it was too late to include it in the exhibition catalogue, which had already been printed at the time. Now the work, dated 1875, is appearing at auction for the first time, providing a rare direct insight into Ferdinand Brütt's early genre painting, which was still characterised by humour and satire.