_July_. Design for a Ceiling Painting for the Café Bauer (6 parts) c. 1884

Curator: This artwork is a preparatory design, titled _July_, part of a six-part ceiling painting concept that Hans Thoma sketched around 1884 for the Café Bauer. Thoma employed chalk, ink, and watercolor for this drawing. Editor: It’s enchanting. A celestial patchwork of reverie, filled with playful cherubs and fantastical beasts, like a hazy dreamscape captured in soft blues and whites. It makes me think about the cultural impact on representations of idealized innocence at the time. Curator: Absolutely, Thoma’s style often evokes a Romantic ideal, tinged with symbolism, reflecting the era's socio-cultural preoccupation with both pastoral beauty and burgeoning industrial progress. Consider the Cafe Bauer, a space intended to showcase the aspirations of a rising bourgeois class. Editor: These babies riding insects, almost weaponized with reeds! And then the floating wisps above. Is this innocence or a premonition? It strikes me that the cafe’s patronage surely had certain preconceptions and aesthetic expectations that this design challenges. Curator: I see your point. These drawings operate within a matrix of cultural codes, playing on anxieties and desires related to nature, childhood, and leisure. Were the proposed figures mere decoration or veiled commentary on power and vulnerability? Editor: It begs us to wonder what a café design meant at the turn of the century. The intended audience and social climate surely influenced everything. What would this room say to the wealthy and empowered sipping coffee there, beyond ‘pretty’? Curator: These watercolor drafts push us to remember that the purpose of design in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with messages, conscious and otherwise. Editor: Definitely, seeing "July" re-contextualized here at the Städel Museum makes me curious to trace its social impact and to see how Thoma's contemporaries responded to such bold depictions of youth. Curator: This design reminds me how integral public works can be in forming societal views; this drawing has shown a little of that today.