Falstaff

Grützner returned repeatedly to Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff as a subject, and this 1903 canvas is among the most celebrated results of that long engagement. Falstaff — rotund, roguish, perpetually thirsty — was a natural fit for an artist whose entire vocabulary revolved around jovial excess and the pleasures of the cellar. By 1903 Grützner had been painting variations on portly, wine-loving characters for three decades, and Falstaff allowed him to give that archetype a literary pedigree. The painting transforms the Shakespearean rogue into a close cousin of Grützner's monks: a figure of blowsy warmth rather than menace, more interested in the contents of his tankard than in any scheme of deception. Grützner's Falstaff enjoyed enormous popularity in reproduction, and the image became one of his most recognized works internationally. The canvas now belongs to the Art Collection of the Federal Republic of Germany, where it stands as a prime example of how late nineteenth-century German painters mined English literary sources to give their genre scenes a respectable cultural dimension.

Grützner gave Falstaff's costume particular painterly attention: the buffed leather doublet, the fur trim, and the glinting metal of the tankard are each rendered with a distinct surface quality achieved through varied brushwork and layered glazes. The face, flushed and alive, is modeled with short, loaded strokes that suggest warmth and bulk.