Christian Seybold (19 March 1695, Neuenhain,

Bad Soden Bad Soden (; also: ''Bad Soden am Taunus'') is a town and spa in the Main-Taunus-Kreis, Hessen, Germany. It had a population of 22,563 , up from 21,412 in 2005. Information Bad Soden is a residential town for commuters working in Frankfurt am ...

- 29 September 1768,

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

)Biographical notes
@ Hessian Biography. was a German painter in the Baroque style. He is best known for his detailed, realistic character heads and portraits (over two dozen of himself), which sometimes stood out from the idealized ones preferred at that time. Most of his works can be classified as

tronies A tronie is a type of work common in Dutch Golden Age painting and Flemish Baroque painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression. These works were not intended as portraits but as studies of expression, type, physiognom ...

Biography

Little is known about his childhood and education. He was one of eleven children in a family that originally came from

Oberursel Oberursel (Taunus) () is a town in Germany and part of the Frankfurt Rhein-Main urban area. It is located to the north west of Frankfurt, in the Hochtaunuskreis county. It is the 13th largest town in Hesse. In 2011, the town hosted the 51st He ...

. At some unknown date, he moved to Vienna. There, in 1715, he married and became a father only three weeks later. Both his wife and child died within the following two years: his son Johann Michael only 23 days after his birth. His wife Elisabeth died 26 October 1717. Within less than seven months, he remarried. His second wife, Susanna, had two children who would live into their adulthood. In 1745 he received an appointment as

court painter A court painter was an artist who painted for the members of a royal or princely family, sometimes on a fixed salary and on an exclusive basis where the artist was not supposed to undertake other work. Painters were the most common, but the cour ...

to King

Augustus III Augustus III ( pl, August III Sas, lt, Augustas III; 17 October 1696 5 October 1763) was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1733 until 1763, as well as Elector of Saxony in the Holy Roman Empire where he was known as Frederick Aug ...

, who was also the

Elector of Saxony The Electorate of Saxony, also known as Electoral Saxony (German: or ), was a territory of the Holy Roman Empire from 1356–1806. It was centered around the cities of Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz. In the Golden Bull of 1356, Emperor Charles ...

, in

Dresden Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth ...

,Cat. Gemäldegalerie Dresden, (Harald Marx), Alte Meister, 1992, pp. 349, 351 Four years later, he was named to fill the same position at the court of Empress Maria Theresa. The style for his detailed character heads was heavily influenced by

Balthasar Denner Balthasar Denner (15 November 1685 – 14 April 1749) was a German painter, highly regarded as a portraitist. He painted mostly half-length and head-and-shoulders portraits and a few group portraits of families in interiors. Usually Denner con ...

. For his self-portraits, he was primarily influenced by Jan Kupecký and Rembrandt. One of his first datable portraits (after 1723, before 1728) is of the imperial counsellor, Count Johann Adam von Questenberg; a prominent patron of the arts. Today his paintings are widely scattered, from the

Louvre The Louvre ( ), or the Louvre Museum ( ), is the world's most-visited museum, and an historic landmark in Paris, France. It is the home of some of the best-known works of art, including the ''Mona Lisa'' and the ''Venus de Milo''. A central l ...

to the

Uffizi The Uffizi Gallery (; it, Galleria degli Uffizi, italic=no, ) is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums ...

and the Hermitage.

References

* * Harald Marx: "Realismus und "choix des attitudes". Zu einem Selbstbildnis von Christian Seybold", in: ''Ars auro prior: Studia Ioanni Białostocki sexagenario dicata'', (1981), pp. 583–587 * Klára Garas: "Christian Seybold und das Malerbildnis in Österreich im 18. Jahrhundert", in: ''Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts'', #34 (1981), pp. 113–137 * Gabriele Wiechert: "Christian Seybold, Wiener Hofkammermaler am Hofe Maria Theresias", In: ''Hessische Familienkunde'' Vol.33, 2010.
Online
* Lilian Ruhe, "… Seybold hat bekannter maßen mehr als eine Schilderweise". De hofschilder Christian Seybold (1695-1768). Portretten en tronies tussen Porenmalerei, rembrandtisme en rococo, PhD-Dissertation Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen 2018 * Lilian Ruhe, ‘Rembrandt between Danube and Elbe. Christian Seybold (1695-1768) and his Self-Portrait with the Wienerisches Diarium under a Magnifying Glass’, in: ''Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts'', 125 (2020), pp. 151-175 * Lilian Ruhe,‘Rembrandt and Balthasar Denner through the Eyes of Christian Seybold (1695-1768). The Iconography of a Self-Portrait and Porentronies Revisited', in: Ferdinand Kühnel, Nedžad Kuč, Marija Wakounig (Eds.), ''Framing History in East-Central Europe and Beyond. Politics - Memory - Discourse.'' (Europa Orientalis, 21/22 (2022), hrsg. vom Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte an der Universität Wien), Vienna 2022, pp. 47-70

External links

Artnet: More paintings by Seybold
* Brief summaries of extended articles about Seybold by Lilian Ruhe in ''Desipienta'',
#39
https://web.archive.org/web/20150923213816/http://www.desipientia.nl/archief.php?nummer=41 #41]
Lilian Ruhe (2014), "Christian Seybold: van "ein Mahler gebürtig von Mäntz" tot "Pictor Aulicus" in Wenen. Aanvullingen op biografie en oeuvre", in: ''Desipientia'', 21 (2014), 2, pp. 46-56.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Seybold, Christian 1695 births 1768 deaths 18th-century German painters 18th-century German male artists German male painters Portrait painters Court painters Court painters of Polish kings People from Main-Taunus-Kreis German emigrants to the Austrian Empire

Biography

References

Further reading

External links