Lot 74 Dα

Photographs of the painter Benjamin Vautier show an elegantly dressed gentleman with a confident, bougeois attitude. However, his painted motifs tend to derive from the peasant or lower middle class environment of his time. He was a master of the anecdotal narrative genre, flavouring his scenes with a pinch of humour, but still treating the humble existence of his protagonists with empathy.

Vautier became well-known outside of Düsseldorf for his genre scenes. He had settled in the Rhenish art metropolis in 1857, where his studio was an important meeting place for many of the young artists studying there, including the Hungarian Mihály von Munkacsy, the Norwegian Vincent Stoltenberg-Lerche, the Finnish-Swedish artist Karl Emmanuel Jansson as well as many young female artists.