Lot 1110 Nα

"[...] the guy is standing there in a bloody distinguished manner, leaning back a little, with his arms folded, he looks at the world once, then turns his back on it". This is how Anselm Feuerbach, then a young academy student in Düsseldorf, described his self-portrait in an undated letter to his parents in Freiburg. The compositional model for this painting, executed in 1847 and now in the Kunstmuseum Basel (inv. no. 1214), was this portrait, created a year earlier. The very young painter depicts himself face on and - as he himself explains in the letter - "in a van Dyckian manner, very much from above, with a black hat and a black velvet jacket with wide-slit sleeves, as I shall have it made for me next summer". The robes remained the same in the 1847 version, although the position, colour and shape of the hat were changed.

This mysterious study had been in the same family for four generations and once hung in the "gentlemen's room" of the prestigious, so-called "Kaiservilla" of the cigar manufacturer and councillor of commerce Fritz Leonhardi in Minden (Westphalia). The self-portrait of the twenty-year-old Feuerbach now joins a group of intimate self-portraits modelled on van Dyck, which the artist "happily painted from nature", as he himself wrote.