Mittagessen („Die Suppe”, II. Fassung)

A farming family are eating their midday meal, tired and silent. They are spooning their soup from a shared bowl in a regular rhythm. The bearded farmer on the bench by the window slumps over the table. Through the window behind him, the sun shines into the room and we look out to a patch of meadow and a barn. The sparsely furnished rustic room is the very heart of the house, where mealtimes are an important part of the people’s communal life. Egger-Lienz painted several versions of some of his pictures. Although this is the second version of the picture Midday Meal dating from 1908, most of the other paintings of this subject were actually based on this one.In each of these, the painter concentrated on the contrasts of light and shadow on the white tablecloth and clothes. It must also have been important to the artist to endow an everyday scene with something sublime. In these pictures the well-earned meal recalls the pathos of an artist like Jean-François Millet. While he was studying in Munich, Egger exchanged many ideas with Franz von Defregger, but his later works exhibited nothing of Defregger’s style.