Picture Book I

Fritz von Uhde's 'Picture Book I' (1889) depicts children engaged with a picture book — one of the most intimate of domestic reading subjects, the child's absorption in the images of the book capturing the moment when the illustrated world becomes real for a young reader. Von Uhde's children subjects combined his naturalist observational skills with his genuine feeling for childhood's specific quality of absorbed imagination. The picture book as a subject object had become newly significant in the late nineteenth century with the development of high-quality color-illustrated children's books.

Von Uhde renders the children with their picture book with the naturalist light handling that characterized his best figure subjects — the children's absorbed engagement with the book's images depicted with the same honest observation he brought to his Biblical modernizations. His handling of the interior light on the children's faces and the book's open pages creates the intimate domestic atmosphere appropriate to the quiet pleasure of the illustrated book.