Catherina Dorothea Viehmann
Signed Print

A woman sits with her arms folded on a table, as if she has been lifted from a tavern scene or the background of a Buegel painting. She is ​​Catherina Dorothea Viehmann, renowned storyteller and the source of many of the fairy tales in the Brothers Grimm collections. In this work Hockney has decided to pay homage to this woman by copying the portrait of her by Ludwig Emil Grimm, brother of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. As with the original the background is stripped of detail and our focus is drawn to her expressive face, the placement of her hands and the swathe of fabric wound at her throat. Her name is inscribed on the table, along with the words ‘Märchen frau’, or fairy woman. Hockney published his Illustrations For Six Fairy Tales From The Brothers Grimm in 1969 in collaboration with Paul Cornwall-Jones of Petersburg Press. The series of monochrome etchings, which recall some of the works from A Rake’s Progress in style, were an immediate success and were reproduced in a book by Oxford University Press which has sold over 150,000 copies to this day. Commenting on his love for the fairy tales Hockney said, “They're fascinating, the little stories, told in a very very simple, direct, straightforward language and style, it was this simplicity that attracted me. They cover quite a strange range of experience, from the magical to the moral.”