Lot 380 Dα

This portrait of the so-called soldier king Frederick William I of Prussia (1688 - 1740) is based on a portrait type conceived by the Prussian court painter Antoine Pesne, the first version of which is kept in Charlottenburg Palace (cf. Berckenhagen, du Colombier, Kühn und Poensgen: Antoine Pesne, Berlin 1958, p. 136, no. 122d). This knee-length version was engraved by Johann Georg Wolfgang in 1731.
Both this work and the portrait of Frederick William's son Frederick II (lot 383) originate from the collection of the art historian Georg Voss (1854 - 1932). Voss worked at the royal Berlin museums as of 1882, and became a professor at the Königlich Technischen Hochschule zu Berlin in 1885. He began working to preserve the monuments of Thuringia in 1899.
We would like to thank Professor Helmut Börsch-Supan in Berlin for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.