The Book, Cat, & Cat Book Lovers Almanac

of historical trivia regarding books, cats, and other animals. Actually this blog has evolved so that it is described better as a blog about cats in history and culture. And we take as a theme the advice of Aldous Huxley: If you want to be a writer, get some cats. Don't forget to see the archived articles linked at the bottom of the page.

December 13, 2015

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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