John Lewis Krimmel

John Lewis Krimmel’s images of the streets and citizenry of contemporary Philadelphia are the earliest genre scenes, or pictures of everyday life, produced in and about America. Krimmel was born Johann Ludwig Krimmel in Ebingen in the southern German duchy of Württemberg. As a young man he worked as a commercial clerk and spent some time in England, where he may have learned to paint in watercolors. In 1809, Krimmel immigrated to Philadelphia to join his older brother in business. About this time, he learned to paint miniature portraits from Alexander Rider (active 1810–1834), a German artist with whom he had traveled from Europe.

Krimmel arrived in Philadelphia when the city, then America’s largest and most prosperous, was the young nation’s cultural and intellectual capital. He soon left his brother’s business to establish himself as a painter of portraits, both miniature and full-size, while drawing from casts of classical statuary at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Around 1811, Krimmel also began drawing and painting domestic genre scenes, set in typical contemporary interiors, as well as images of street life and events in his adopted city. His compositions, character types, and subjects were influenced by the popular paintings of Scottish artist David Wilkie (1785–1841), seventeenth-century Dutch genre works, and contemporary German genre painting, circulated in the United States in the form of reproductive prints. Often complex, Krimmel’s scenes feature a wide range of social types and several parallel events or actions within a single frame; with gentle irony and humor, his works capture the flavor of contemporary American domestic and urban life through figures’ varied situations and emotions. His exterior scenes sometimes portray specific events as they happened in his adopted city, from catastrophes to celebrations, with a focus on the reactions of ordinary bystanders. His moralizing domestic scenes, however, are typically set in old-fashioned interiors that suggest rural life.

Krimmel’s paintings were exhibited in Philadelphia and later also in New York, a growing art center. However, his scenes of American life, virtually unprecedented, found little favor among collectors, whose patronage of native artists was then limited to portraiture. Krimmel supported himself largely through portrait painting and by teaching drawing at a girls’ school. In 1816, he returned to Europe for two years, traveling through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. On his return to Philadelphia, he began to realize a modest success as several of his genre scenes were published as prints. Krimmel had received a commission for a major historical work, a large painting depicting William Penn’s landing in America, when he died from drowning at the age of thirty-five.