Flying kites

Flying Kites (1880) at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, belongs to Spitzweg's very late work, painted when he was seventy-five. The subject — kites rising against a sky — is among his most open and unencumbered images: no enclosed spaces, no solitary eccentrics, just the pure pleasure of watching coloured shapes pulled upward by the wind. By 1880 Spitzweg's style had loosened considerably from the precision of his middle-period character studies, reflecting both the influence of the Munich plein-air movement and the natural development of an old man's hand toward the impressionistic and suggestive. The cardboard support is characteristic of his late work — lightweight, portable, suited to sketchy, direct execution. The Alte Nationalgalerie gives this late work its authoritative institutional context.

Cardboard as a support absorbs paint differently from canvas — more quickly, with less blending time available, encouraging a sketchy directness. The sky, necessarily the dominant element in a kite-flying scene, is painted with the loose, fresh brushwork of Spitzweg's late manner. Kite forms are indicated with confident shorthand strokes of colour against the blue-grey sky.