The Bookworm (German: Der Bücherwurm) is an 1850 oil-on-canvas painting by the German painter and poet Carl Spitzweg. The picture is typical of Spitzweg's humorous, anecdotal style and it is characteristic of Biedermeier art in general. The painting is representative of the introspective and conservative mood in Europe during the period between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutions of 1848, but at the same time pokes fun at those attitudes by embodying them in the fusty old scholar unconcerned with the affairs of the mundane world.
Famous quotes containing the word bookworm:
“This is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve
Of the elaboration; it asks no place in it, only insertion hors-texte as the invisible notion of how that day grew
From planisphere to heaven, and what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm ...”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)