646 - Otto Wilhelm Eduard Erdmann, Courtship & Presentation of the Groom, two oil paintings, both framed identically

Otto Wilhelm Eduard Erdmann, Courtship & Presentation of the Groom, two oil paintings, both framed identically Otto Wilhelm Eduard Erdmann, 1834 Leipzig - 1905 Düsseldorf, German Neo-Rococo genre painter, here: A gallant gentleman asks for a young lady’s hand in marriage, oil on canvas, 17.5 x 24.5 cm, framed with an engraved nameplate & A courtly interior with five elegantly dressed men and women seated at a table, welcoming the groom and his father. In the background, servants; oil on canvas, 28 x 39 cm, framed with an engraved nameplate About the artist: Shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Otto Wilhelm Eduard Erdmann began studying painting at the Leipzig Academy; a year later, he transferred to the Dresden Academy, where he studied in the painting studio under, inter alia, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Eduard Robert Bary, Heinrich Gotthold Arnold, Johann Karl Ulrich Bähr and Julius Hübner. After completing his studies, he moved to Munich, where he joined the local art society and the Artists’ and Singers’ Association, and came into contact with Louis von Hagn’s Rococo style of painting. In Munich, Erdmann also took lessons at the painting school run by the artist Albert Graefle, whose personal and professional connection to Franz Xaver Winterhalter made a strong impression on Erdmann’s later work. In 1858, Erdmann settled in Düsseldorf, where he ‘became a specialist in the Rococo era, endowed with the finest sensibility for the subtlety and delicacy of colour’. From then on, he painted almost exclusively genre pictures depicting scenes from this ‘gallant’ era. These are characterised by subtle humour, a piquant perspective and pleasing motifs, often set in a courtly milieu.