(Vienna 1793–1865 Hinterbrühl)
Childhood Tenderness, signed, dated Waldmüller (18)63, oil on panel cradled, 47.5 x 38 cm, framed, (W) 

Provenance:
C. J. Wawra, 6. May 1912, lots 109;
Collection Wagner; 
Private collection, Austria;
Wiener Kunst Auktionen, 29. March 1995, lot 432;
Kunsthandlung Giese & Schweiger, Vienna, Autumn 1995;
Private collection, Vienna;
Dorotheum Wien, 10. December 1997, lot 22.

Catalogued in:
Rupert Feuchtmüller, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793–1865. Leben, Schriften, Werke, Vienna-Munich 1996, CR no. 1076.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller is one of the best-known Austrian painters of the 19th century. Born in Vienna in 1793, he attended Vienna’s Academy sporadically and came to landscape, portrait and genre painting via miniature painting and a job as a scenery painter in a theatre. He went on to master all of these fields. When looking for new subjects, he wandered through Vienna’s suburbs and surroundings, and found his home in the family idyll of the Biedermeier period. 
His characteristic genre images examine situations drawn from everyday life, which he embeds in his works like a snapshot.  This is also the case in the present painting, which depicts a mother sitting in her bourgeois home. She is leaning on a table and is protectively holding her young child on her lap. She, and the boy walking towards her with his head tenderly inclined towards the child’s head, are holding a flower. This domestic scene is aptly titled “Childhood Tenderness”, and is a variant of the popular image which has been dubbed “Mother’s Joy”. The enhanced movements and spontaneous style of painting harmonise with the gentle contact between the figures, who in turn are characteristic of Waldmüller’s genre images.