The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

Die Miniatur Über den Künstler

The Tansey Miniatures Foundation

DE
The Miniature About the Artist

Lady with Cupid

Karl Gustav Klingstedt

After a military career, Karl Gustav Klingstedt, a native of Riga, moved to Paris to work as a miniature painter and specialised in small, frequently erotic and gallant scenes, which he preferred to mount on snuff boxes.1 His works are mostly executed in a type of grisaille restricted to a spectrum of grey tones, giving the figures a special depth similar to a sculpture. He used individual coloured accents to draw attention to special details.

Here a young lady is turning to the naked Cupid, who is nestling up to her with only the faintest resistance. His left hand rests on his bow, and he has buckled his quiver onto his back with a fine leather belt. Its red colour shines out just like his lips. The message is clear: the lady is asking Cupid to use his arrows to make the recipient of this gift – who is perhaps still sceptical – favourably disposed to her (cf. cat. no. 2016-97).
J. S. O.

1 For this reason, his contemporaries rather disparagingly called him the “Raphael of snuff boxes” (Dictionnaire de la Conversation 1856, p. 782). Snuff boxes, a male-dominated domain, were often decorated with gallant and erotic, sometimes even pornographic images. For a selection of his works, cf. Bernd Pappe, Galante Miniaturen. Die Sammlung Dr. Löer im Neuen Schloss Bayreuth, Regensburg 2019, pp. 92-105).