‘The Irritating Gentleman’: a timeless portrait of male ego
Those who have never seen Berthold Woltze’s The Irritating Gentleman have already seen it. It’s in the bored stare of every woman at a bar being lectured on the cultural significance of a little-known indie flick called Pulp Fiction, desperately looking for a conversational out. The pleading eyes seen in Woltze’s 1864 painting might never have happened in Mia Wallace’s dance sequence, but the dread in them is universal. The leering man in the painting is a generational ode to annoying men.
The man is significantly older than the girl, dressed in a bow tie and hat. A cigarette dangles from his hand, and the beanie-wearing film-bro comparisons write themselves. But it’s what the girl wears that drives the painting from comic to tragic. Dressed in all black, she rests her hat in her lap as a single tear rolls down her face. The assumption is that she’s in mourning, and her desolate look, coupled with the fact she’s travelling alone, leaves you wondering if a parent just died.
That was the magic of Woltze’s narrative painting. He was part of the German school of realism artists, who all abandoned the dominant romantic trend in favour of shockingly lifelike scenes. While they’re often accused of rejecting the emotive tone of their predecessors, their everyday scenes were somehow more evocative – a genuine portrait of urban scenes. The realists were keen social observers, prizing open human interactions and mining them for inspiration.
That’s what makes Woltze’s gaze so morally charged because the social cues are so well studied. There’s unspoken significance in the avoidant gaze of the girl and the embarrassment of the older man’s companion. He positions the girl in front of two men with intention – In the face of her vulnerability, the other man in the foreground simply looks away. Woltze’s painting is a visual marvel, but the ugliness of the interaction is what makes it memorable.
It’s also why the mid-19th century painting has become a contemporary feminist symbol. The quiet sexual threat, the outnumbered young girl, and her tears have been routinely parodied and recreated, often likened to the infamous picture of a girl in a club in Vietnam staring her way through a forced conversation with a man and making routine appearances on Reddit.
Maybe the most tragic element of the painting, and the reason it’s still resonant, is the title. Of every plausible description he could pick, Woltze settled on “irritating”. It’s important because his other paintings have far less detail, A Letter from America or The Bargain, so its inclusion is by design.
Something is menacing about the tone he paints with, and he translates the girl’s fear with acute detail. But even despite her visceral reaction, it’s only deemed irritating. That he chose to describe their interaction this way speaks to how common they are, a judgment he made in 1864 that’s frustratingly true to this day.
