At the Crossroads

This is a beautiful and tender scene of children praying to Christ Crucified at a very traditional wayside crucifixion shrine very common in Germany and Austria. The genre painter Carl Böker was a successful artist of the Düsseldorf School of Painting. He was a student under Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow and Karl Ferdinand Sohn at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and was further a member of the academic artists' association 'Orient' as well as the Düsseldorf based artist group 'Malkasten'.