(Grünstadt 1719–1768 Darmstadt)
A young girl knitting,
oil on panel, 15 x 11.9 cm, framed

We are grateful to Gerhard Kölsch for his help in identifying the artist. A written certificate is available.

This work by Johann Conrad Seekatz represents a special form of genre painting featuring children, for which the Darmstadt-based painter already became famous during his lifetime. A flourishing Frankfurt art market and private collectors paid substantial amounts of money for his genre scenes ‘in the Dutch style’; his works also adorned the picture cabinet of Johann Caspar Goethe. From 1759 to 1763 Seekatz worked for François de Thoranc, the ‘King’s Lieutenant’, who particularly valued his genre paintings as ‘natural and innocent ideas’ (Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth; see the Pictures of the Twelve Months for Thoranc, Goethe-Museum Frankfurt).

Seekatz’s genre scenes contain a broad spectrum of themes, although they reveal the artist’s preference for the lives of pedlars, travelling people, Savoyards, and bandits. The painter described his scenes with narrative detail and in a thoroughly idealising manner. In all of them children play an important role, and in some the artist focused exclusively on them, depicting their innocent merrymaking. However, he more or less relied on Dutch examples from the seventeenth century, which were in great demand among collectors. Whereas Seekatz frequently harked back to the Leiden Fijnschilders, the present work stands out for its comparatively livelier and more spontaneous manner of painting. Using somewhat jagged, dynamic brushstrokes and slightly raised highlights, he specifically defined details in the clothes and the bonnet and bow in the hair. The vibrant painting style of the present picture of a young girl and the palette composed of subtly nuanced brown, pink, yellowish, and off-white tones recur in further scenes with children by this painter, such as in the fluidly painted Young Boy Reading on oak, which recently appeared on the art market. Given the painter’s stylistic development, both pictures seem to date from the period around 1760/65. A number of masterfully finished oil studies with which Seekatz prepared many of his paintings similarly reveal a manner of painting characterised by dynamically rendered individual forms and an impasto application of paint.