German painter Carl Spitzweg is considered one of the foremost artists of the Biedermeier era, a transitional period spanning the three decades between the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Revolution of 1848. The Biedermeier era celebrated simple, middle-class sensibilities and the importance of family and community, not the emotionally-heightened individualistic experiences preached by the Romantics.

Spitzweg, in particular, created numerous portraits of the average citizen going about his or her daily routine in a decidedly un-profound way. Like many of his contemporaries, he was greatly influenced by the Dutch seventeenth-century masters, such as Frans van Mieris, Jan Steen and Gerard Terborch. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu writes, "...