Focus on Gnome Watching Railway Train and explain the Analysis.
In 2008, the art historian Florian Illies made a comparison to J. M. W. Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844), "modernity's break-in into art history", and interpreted Gnome Watching Railway Train as Spitzweg's self-ironic comment to his reputation as someone who wanted to stop time. According to Illies, Spitzweg's gnome is a caricature of someone who thinks he can watch the modern world come and go from his cave.Analysing the painting in 2018, the German studies scholar Theodore Ziolkowski grouped it with Charles Dickens' novel Dombey and Son (1848), William Wordsworth's poem "On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway" (1844) and several texts by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. The railway here symbolises the new technology, which is accepted but also regarded as destructive. Spitzweg's composition, with an elevated figure gazing across a landscape, had previously been used by romantic painters like Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable and Eugène Delacroix. Instead of conveying a romantic message, however, Spitzweg's gnome is humouristic, and the seemingly idyllic painting is ironic. Ziolkowski wrote: "No painting could mark more precisely the artist's recognition that the Romanticism in which he began his career has been displaced by the technological developments of the contemporary world—the developments that inform his contemporary Biedermeier culture as well as the approaching Realism. The Romantic reverence for art, which it regarded as a substitute for religion, has given way to humor and irony."
John Constable Caspar David Friedrich Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway romantic Charles Dickens German studies gnome Biedermeier Realism Eugène Delacroix Florian Illies composition Gnome Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff Romanticism J. M. W. Turner Dombey and Son William Wordsworth art historian Theodore Ziolkowski