843 - F. H. Brühne, farmer in fur cap with clay pipe building a model ship by the fire, genre painting

F. H. Brühne, farmer in fur cap with clay pipe building a model ship by the fire, genre painting Oil on hardboard, signed lower left F. H. Brühne, inscribed F. H. Brühne on the plaque on the frame, 1st half of the 20th century. Genre interior in the old master manner: in a rustic parlour a white-haired old man with a brown fur cap and a white clay pipe in the corner of his mouth sits at a wooden table, dressed in a brilliant red shirt, a dark neckerchief and wide dark trousers, working with concentration on a model sailing ship with white sails and a red flag. To the right a copper-red kettle over an open hearth. Good condition commensurate with age, partly rubbed and with scratches, the upper layer torn at the lower right. Image 60 x 50 cm (h x w), sumptuous stucco frame in the Baroque manner with shell cartouches, with knocks and rubbed, frame width 12.5 cm. Friedrich Heinrich Brühne (1879–1949) was a genre painter and commercial artist active in Düsseldorf. His work centres on character studies of elderly men indoors: pipe-smoking peasants and seamen, newspaper readers, wine drinkers or an old man spinning, often in Dutch costume with fur cap, neckerchief and a long white clay pipe. He thus stands in the tradition of Düsseldorf genre painting, which from the 1820s drew on 17th-century Dutch painting and depicted everyday life in a narrative, detailed manner; the fishing villages of the Dutch coast were among the favourite motifs of the Düsseldorf painters. This cabinet picture of an old man building a model ship by the hearth combines interior, genre scene and character study.