The Blue Salon
  • Eduard Gaertner
  • Berlin 1801 - 1877 Zechlin
  • The Blue Salon, 1848
  • Watercolour and gouache, on paper,
    all four corners cropped,
  • signed and dated on the lower right: E. Gaertner. 48
  • 230 × 336 mm
Provenance:
Siegfried Graf Pückler-Limpurg, Oberaudorf

Eduard Gaertner worked hard to acquire his reputation as the era’s greatest painter of vedute. At the age of twelve, he began an apprenticeship as a porcelain painter in the Royal Manufactory in Berlin (KPM), transferring six years later to the studio of the theatrical painter Carl W. Gropius. It was Princess Luise herself who gave the young Gaertner his first commission for the “representation of perspectival rooms.” A depiction of the palace chapel at Charlottenburg for King Friedrich Wilhelm III resulted in his artistic breakthrough. Gaertner used the princely fee to study for two years under Fr. E. Bertin in Paris, before settling as an independent painter in Berlin in 1828.

Soon, similar “interior views” became Gaertner’s speciality, which he prepared with great fidelity of detail into the 1850’s (see Fig.1). He obtained these commissions not only from the Prussian royal family, but also from the emergent bourgeoisie, who hoped to emulate the nobility.

This watercolour can be dated not only by its inscription but also by the opened book, as the title, “Die Frau Professorin” is a reference by the artist to Berthold Auerbach’s novella of the same name, which appeared in 1846.