December 13, 1836

Franz von Lenbach (December 13, 1836 to May 6, 1904) was a German painter and his portraits of many famous people are one reason he was ennobled in 1882. So successful was his practise that he built a Florentine styled villa in Munich, for his family,  in 1886, which is today an art museum known as Lenbachhaus.





According to one site it was:


Whilst working in Florence Lenbach met Karl Eduard Baron von Liphart, a central figure of the German expatriate art colony in Florence, and it was through him that Lenbach picked up some lucrative portraiture commissions. .... When...[he] returned ... to Vienna [he] began to concentrate on his portraiture work. Many famous people sat for Lenbach including Richard Wagner, Emperor Franz Joseph I, Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, Emperor Wilhelm I and he completed almost a hundred portraits of Otto Fürst Bismark. It was during this period that Lenbach became recognised as the most famous contemporary German portrait painter.


One of Lenbach's last portraits was not of the powerful however, but this child, in a painting dated to 1903:






















Marsha Brown




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