Cultured Wednesday: Hacker’s Smithy in Winter

Not much can be found online about the German painter and art collector Horst Bernhard Hacker safe that he was born on 8 April 1842 in Plaußig near Leipzig, Saxony, and that he passed away on 18 December 1906 in Munich, Bavaria.  He saw the turn of the last century, a time since dubbed fin de siècle in the world of politics, art and culture, a period of degeneration as well as of hope for a new beginning, and also a period much discussed at the turn of the 20th century, as can be imagined.

How much or in what way Hacker was influenced by the ‘turn-of-the-century’ mood we do not know; his Schmiede im Winter (Smithy in Winter), which he painted in the late 19th century and which exists in at least two versions, can be viewed as representing the largely pre-technological world, an idyllic setting of the lonely homestead outside the village by the frozen stream.

Wikimedia has a few more of Hacker’s paintings listed, as well as his portrait as it appeared in the catalog of the Jahrhundertausstellung that took place in 1906.  Maybe his face can tell you something more about him, or you can choose to just enjoy his painting.  Clicking the painting above will take you to a much larger image that shows brush strokes and technicalities of the painting very well, if you are interested in such things.