Friedrich Karl Steinhardt

FRIEDRICH KARL STEINHARDT (Germany, 1844- 1894).
"Portrait of ladies",
Oil on canvas.
Signed in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 55 x 41 cm; 63 x 48 cm (frame).
In this work of Karl Friedrich Steinhardt, recognized for his attention to detail and his inclination for the representation of refined genre scenes, we are presented with an intimate scene starring two ladies inside a room decorated with elements of marked orientalist taste. The female figures, elegantly dressed according to the fashion of the second half of the 19th century, are absorbed in a moment of conversation or silent contemplation, situated in an environment that reveals both their social position and their link with the aesthetic values of their time.
The interior, carefully constructed with an almost scenographic look, is decorated with objects of oriental aesthetics such as the chair on the left, a hanging lamp and a glazed ceramic piece, probably inspired by Chinese porcelain. These elements not only visually enrich the scene, but also respond to the phenomenon of decorative orientalism that permeated the European bourgeois imaginary during the nineteenth century, where the exotic was assimilated as synonymous with sophistication, luxury and distant world.
The ladies, the protagonists of the painting, are part of an iconographic type that proliferated during that century: the bourgeois woman as a subject of contemplation, symbol of refined domesticity and, at the same time, bearer of a restrained and elegant beauty. Her restrained attitude, the arrangement of the furniture, the soft lighting that enters through a non-visible source, all respond to an aesthetic where calm, detail and compositional harmony are essential.
Steinhardt, with his precise brush and his restrained but richly nuanced palette, captures the instant with an almost photographic clarity, although always filtered by the idealism of academic genre painting. This work, like many others of the period, not only documents the daily life of the upper middle class, but also constructs an idealized image of the domestic world.

Friedrich Karl Steinhardt was a German portraitist and genre painter. Although not much is known about his biography, it is believed that he worked for a few years in Paris and later worked as a portraitist and genre painter in Munich. His paintings are in museums such as the National Museum of Wales (Portrait of Adelina Patti) and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.