Wilhelm Busch

Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908) was a German painter, draftsman, and humorist whose illustrated stories — most famously Max und Moritz (1865) — made him one of the founding figures of the modern comic strip. Less known are his hundreds of small-format oil paintings produced privately in his studio at Wiedensahl: still lifes, peasant interiors, landscapes, and portraits in a sober Munich-Realist manner influenced by Dutch seventeenth-century painting and by his close contemporary Wilhelm Leibl. He never exhibited these paintings during his lifetime.

Busch painted with restrained earth-tone palettes, careful tonal observation, and a quiet humor entirely absent from his hilarious illustrated comic stories. His oils show particular affinity with Dutch seventeenth-century domestic painting.

Busch invented the modern comic strip with Max und Moritz and produced an extraordinary parallel body of private easel painting that anticipated twentieth-century German realism.