A rare 18th-century German peep show depicting a busy wine cellar.
At the rear of the scene two men are talking and sit at a table with bottles of wine. Further forwards a wine steward can be seen pouring a glass of wine for a woman, surrounded by barrels. On the next card there is a lord and lady talking while a servant is sweeping the floor of the wine cellar. Before this is a card depicting two Kellermeisters (cellar masters, who were also winemakers at this time in Germany). One is holding a wine thief (a tube used to take wine out of the bunghole of a barrel); the other is decanting wine out of a barrel and into a bottle. In the foreground a gentleman is speaking with a cooper; the cooper is holding a mallet and rings of metal for the barrels. The first, and foremost card, is of the large open wooden doors to the cellar. On one side is a Kellermeister and on the other side is a serving woman; the woman is carrying a tray of wine glasses and a pitcher for wine and the man is holding a large wine pitcher.
Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) was a celebrated engraver and print-seller. He was initially employed by a local publishing house though in 1708 had moved to Berlin. In 1711, he started work for his elder brother, Christian (1672-1735). By 1717, he had established his own business, and from 1719 enjoyed royal protection for the next 30 years. Martin came to prominence with development of the peepshow and monopolised its production. He employed two artists, Jeremias Wachsmuth (1711-1771) and Johann David Nessenthaler (1717-1766), who produced designs for the peepshows.
Francis Terpak states: “Between the 1720s and the 1770s, thousands of miniature theaters, constructed from sets of six to eight hand-coloured prints, were purchased by the wealthier classes of Europe, presumably as fanciful, amusing, or instructive decorations for the home. These very commercially successful three dimensional theaters were produced exclusively by one printmaker, Martin Engelbrecht of Augsburg and his workshop. Marketed throughout Europe, Engelbrecht theatres came in three standard sizes, with titles printed in German, French Italian, Latin, or English. The layers of Engelbrecht’s miniature theaters were designed to be spaced sequentially in a special viewing device, called Guckkasten in German, mondo nuovo in Italian, and in English ‘peepshow.’ These rectangular wooden boxes had an aperture, with or without a magnifying lens, through which observers would protect the scene with a heightened sense of spatial illusion. It is apparent that most of the Guckkasten constructed for Engelbrecht theaters were used only for private viewing in bourgeois and aristocratic settings, in part because the complicated multilevel and fragile prints did not lend themselves to heavy use.” (Terpak, F, “Free Time, Free Spirit: Popular Entertainments in Gainsborough’s Era” in Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 70, No. 2 (June 2007), pp209-228.
