Carl Spitzweg: The Bookworm (1850)

(Museum Georg Schäfer, Schweinfurt, Germany)

A painting by the German artist Carl Spitzweg (1808 – 1885). Spitzweg often made humorous genre works and this is a typical piece of him. A untidily dressed elderly man stands on top of a ladder with several books jammed under his arms and between his legs as he looks at a book. The plaque on the bookcase shows he is consulting books from the section of "Metaphysics". painting from 1850.