Portrait of Wilhelm Witz and His Pet Dogs

Identified in Jacob Maentel’s portrait by the inscription at the upper left edge, Wilhelm Witz stands in left facing profile, wearing a formal black cutaway coat and black top hat. He holds up a tambourine adorned with bells, perhaps beating it with his unseen right hand as his two mismatched pet dogs, upright on their hind legs, seem to dance. Behind them a small wooden table bears a glass carafe, a ceramic pitcher, two drinking glasses, and a plate of biscuits or cakes. The apt expression “eat, drink, and be merry,” rendered in German in so-called fraktur or blackletter script, hovers above these objects. Above the tambourine another inscription, “Copenhagner Waltzer” (Copenhagen waltz) refers to a popular early nineteenth-century dance tune whose rhythm Witz presumably beats out.

Nothing is known of Wilhelm Witz, most likely a member of the German immigrant community around York, Pennsylvania, where Maentel, himself German-born, worked before 1819. His small-scale watercolor portraits often show figures full-length and rigidly profiled, as here and in another Maentel work in the Terra Foundation's collection, Woman in Profile with a Flower (TF 1999.94). These features, along with the inscriptions about the subject, link Maentel's portraits with the tradition of fraktur, the highly decorated commemorative certificates popular in Pennsylvania's large German-speaking immigrant community in the early nineteenth century. Whereas such certificates usually document births, baptisms, weddings, and other important occasions, Maentel's portrait of Witz simply records one individual's devotion to pleasure, and his pride in his dancing dogs.

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