Small But Stubborn / The Unruly

"Small But Stubborn" (also known as "The Unruly"), painted on panel in 1875 and held by the Alte Nationalgalerie, shares its creation year and support material with "Two Young Shoemakers" from the same collection, suggesting a productive period of panel painting within Busch's 1875 output. The title signals the kind of behavioral observation that bridges Busch's illustrated work — full of stubborn, willful characters facing comic consequences — and his painting practice. A child's stubborn resistance to authority, rendered without narrative context and as pure observed psychology, transforms a satirical trope into a universal human moment. The Alte Nationalgalerie holds both this work and its companion from 1875 as examples of Busch engaging with childhood observation — a genre with distinguished predecessors in Flemish and Dutch painting — through direct painterly means. The panel support, as with the shoemakers painting, gives the image a precise, stable surface well-suited to the close observation of expression.

Panel allows Busch to model the child's expression with particular precision; the firm surface resists the spontaneous drags and bleeds that can soften detail on canvas. The palette likely uses the warm neutrals of his Realist vocabulary, with the child's face as the compositional and psychological center.