Works by Wilhelm Busch

Away from the comic picture stories that made him famous, Wilhelm Busch painted small oil sketches of village fields, cowherds and bawling children, some of them on cardboard, and showed almost none of them until late in life.

In 1852 he left the Düsseldorf academy for Antwerp, where he saw paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Adriaen Brouwer and Frans Hals for the first time; they caught his interest and made him doubt his own skill. Brouwer's drunkards and rowdies stayed with him. In a sleeping drunkard of 1869 a man in shirtsleeves slumps on a stool, head drooping, and Bitter Medicine, of about 1892, is a head in profile with eyes screwed shut and mouth wide open. A crying boy is little more than a few pink and white strokes on brown, and in Small But Stubborn a grown-up grips a howling boy by the head in a dark room.

Many of his landscapes come from the country around Wiedensahl and Lüthorst. Look for the small figure in a red jacket, often seen from behind, like the cowherd on a rock beside two cows in Shepherd with cows. In the mid-1880s landscapes the brushwork is as broad as the young Franz von Lenbach's, and in Landscape with rain the sky is laid in with slanting strokes. Busch thought few of his pictures finished: he stacked them in damp corners, where they stuck together, and burnt some in the garden. Poor grounds and paints have darkened most of them to nearly one colour. He gave up painting in 1896.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Städel Museum, Alte Nationalgalerie, Museum Folkwang, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Belvedere, Indianapolis Museum of Art.