Lot 2112 Dα

Dr Marianne Heinz in Kassel writes in her expertise to the present work: “Kurt Luthmer's selected list of paintings by the Hessian painter family includes a description of a work that could correspond to the present canvas, '… The children are shown surrounded by toys, flowers, and a basket of coloured Easter eggs. The elder of the two wears a pale copper coloured gown and the younger a lilac cap. Also yellow in a purple dress [possibly a doll's dress], blue ribbons, and a hyacinth flower. Brown ground. The name of the elder child A.C. Tischbein on one egg.' The list also includes details on the signature and date, 'painted 14th April 1762 J. H. Tischbein.' These inscriptions are no longer visible today as the canvas has been relined and can therefore no longer be verified.
The date of 1762 would correspond to the age of both daughters at the time. The elder, Wilhelmine Caroline Amalie (1757 - 1838) and Wilhelmine Ernestine Friederike (1759 - ?), were 5 and 3 years old. Only the dimensions listed by Luthmer, 53 x 53 cm, fail to correspond to the present work, but this may be due to an error in transcription. It is also questionable that one of the Easter eggs was inscribed 'A.C. Tischbein', as the artist's eldest daughter is generally referred to in portraits as Wilhelmine Caroline. My first suspicion that the inscription could have been the signature of A. W. Tischbein, while supported by the unusually vivid colour palette of the work, is difficult to uphold since the Hanau Tischbein always signed his works A.W. Tischbein and thus the assumption that it could have been a conjoined WT monogram must be abandoned.
This portrait of the artist's daughters can be grouped together with a small but particularly finely painted group of works in which J. H. Tischbein the Elder portrayed his family. It includes the self portrait with his first wife Marie Sophie Robert, dated 1769 and housed in the Berliner Gemäldegalerie, but also the later self portrait with his two daughters in the Landesgalerie in Hannover dated 1774. The interior depicted in all three paintings is almost identical, showing Tischbein's private studio in his apartment in Kassel.”