Luise Scholderer lesend mit Katze 7 - 1876

Otto Scholderer made this intimate pencil drawing in 1876. It depicts Luise Scholderer, presumably a relative, absorbed in reading with a cat dozing beside her. The scene speaks to a rising middle class in Germany and across Europe. A comfortable domestic setting, with a houseplant and a woman at leisure, signaled a shift away from agrarian life. Instead, it represents a society focused on the values of education, personal space, and quiet contemplation. But these apparently natural social developments were shaped by cultural institutions and economic circumstances. The rise of literacy and the book trade made reading more accessible. New ideals about women’s roles in society also played a part. Images like this provided a visual rhetoric for the way bourgeois society wanted to see itself. To better understand this drawing, one might research the history of reading, the changing role of women, and the art market in Germany in the late 19th century. Art always reflects the time in which it was made.