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To look people in the face is the portraitist's destiny. What appears on the canvas is more or less similar and does not always reveal the essence of the person portrayed. Anton Graff with his attentive eye and his artistic talent, however, many prominent contemporaries rightly entrusted their portraits to him.
Born in Winterthur, Switzerland, as the son of a tin caster, the talented boy was predestined for a profession in the crafts, but only marginally as an artist. However, he was able to develop his skills at the local drawing school of Johann Ulrich Schellenberg before he moved to the engraver Johann Jakob Haid in Augsburg in 1756. One year later he joined the portrait and court painter Leonhard Schneider. The copying of portraits, which was common practice at the time, led him to make representations of Frederick the Great. In 1759 he left Schneider's workshop and turned again to Johann Jakob Haid. The spirit of the Enlightenment reached him at the latest when he visited the Swiss theologians and philosophers Johann Georg Sulzer and Johann Kaspar Lavater in the company of the painter Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1764. The encounter seems to have had a not inconsiderable influence on him. As a renowned portraitist, he was appointed court painter of the Electorate of Saxony in 1766 and in the same year followed an appointment to the Dresden Academy of Art. From then on, his place of work was Dresden, which he left only occasionally.
Many well-known portraits of the painter shed light on the significance of people and the spirit of the times. Apart from views of Frederick the Great and Frederick William II, the artist placed all kinds of important public figures on canvas or drawing paper. Among them are intellectual greats and literary figures such as Lessing, Herder and Schiller. However, in contrast to the preceding epochs of the Baroque and early Rococo, he portrayed representatives of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The spirit of the Enlightenment is reflected here in the names and character of the persons depicted, but also in the artist's clear painterly rendering. The pictures precisely show details of clothing and sometimes accessories as symbols of status. And yet the expression of the faces is not rigid, the portraits are not impersonal. They always lead us to suspect the character of the individual. In terms of colour, most pictures appear rather restrained. However, the movement of the body or a special facial expression, often surprisingly emotional for a representative portrait, makes them appear moved and lively. Although the persons depicted are in an undefined space, the versatile artist later turned to this aspect in some of his works. Around 1800, some landscape paintings from the Dresden area show a completely different expression: they show a tendency towards Romanticism. Thematically they are not far from motifs Caspar David Friedrichs and Philipp Otto Runges and offered them artistic orientation. Painterly, however, the first signs of an impressionistic mode of representation can be seen.
To look people in the face is the portraitist's destiny. What appears on the canvas is more or less similar and does not always reveal the essence of the person portrayed. Anton Graff with his attentive eye and his artistic talent, however, many prominent contemporaries rightly entrusted their portraits to him.
Born in Winterthur, Switzerland, as the son of a tin caster, the talented boy was predestined for a profession in the crafts, but only marginally as an artist. However, he was able to develop his skills at the local drawing school of Johann Ulrich Schellenberg before he moved to the engraver Johann Jakob Haid in Augsburg in 1756. One year later he joined the portrait and court painter Leonhard Schneider. The copying of portraits, which was common practice at the time, led him to make representations of Frederick the Great. In 1759 he left Schneider's workshop and turned again to Johann Jakob Haid. The spirit of the Enlightenment reached him at the latest when he visited the Swiss theologians and philosophers Johann Georg Sulzer and Johann Kaspar Lavater in the company of the painter Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1764. The encounter seems to have had a not inconsiderable influence on him. As a renowned portraitist, he was appointed court painter of the Electorate of Saxony in 1766 and in the same year followed an appointment to the Dresden Academy of Art. From then on, his place of work was Dresden, which he left only occasionally.
Many well-known portraits of the painter shed light on the significance of people and the spirit of the times. Apart from views of Frederick the Great and Frederick William II, the artist placed all kinds of important public figures on canvas or drawing paper. Among them are intellectual greats and literary figures such as Lessing, Herder and Schiller. However, in contrast to the preceding epochs of the Baroque and early Rococo, he portrayed representatives of both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. The spirit of the Enlightenment is reflected here in the names and character of the persons depicted, but also in the artist's clear painterly rendering. The pictures precisely show details of clothing and sometimes accessories as symbols of status. And yet the expression of the faces is not rigid, the portraits are not impersonal. They always lead us to suspect the character of the individual. In terms of colour, most pictures appear rather restrained. However, the movement of the body or a special facial expression, often surprisingly emotional for a representative portrait, makes them appear moved and lively. Although the persons depicted are in an undefined space, the versatile artist later turned to this aspect in some of his works. Around 1800, some landscape paintings from the Dresden area show a completely different expression: they show a tendency towards Romanticism. Thematically they are not far from motifs Caspar David Friedrichs and Philipp Otto Runges and offered them artistic orientation. Painterly, however, the first signs of an impressionistic mode of representation can be seen.