The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape

1828

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Austrian, 1793–1865)

This portrait’s sitter, a famous Viennese actor named Maximilian Korn, poses elegantly in fine garments with his finger holding his place in a book, as if he has just been interrupted while reading. Artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, no stranger to the theater himself, honed his skill as a painter by copying well-known works in Dresden, Rome, and Vienna while on tour with his wife, Katharina Weidner, a successful opera singer. Here, Waldmüller updated the traditional Renaissance portrait with a landscape background by integrating the sitter into his organic surroundings: Korn leans on a mossy rock and basks in the same sunlight that illuminates the distant mountains.

Status: On View, Gallery 221
Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe

Artist: Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller
Title: The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape
Place: Austria (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1828
Medium: Oil on panel
Inscriptions: Inscribed lower right: Waldmüller 1828
Dimensions: 31.5 × 26 cm (12 3/8 × 10 1/4 in.); Framed: 45.1 × 39.4 × 8.3 cm (17 3/4 × 15 1/2 × 3 1/4 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Jane B. Gidwitz
Reference Number: 2003.118
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/181478/manifest.json

Bruno Grimschitz, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Salzburg: Verlag Galerie Welz, 1957), pp. 35, 295, no. 217, pl. 2.
Bruno Grimschitz, “Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller,” Neue Österreichische Biographie ab 1815 14 (1960), p. 56.
Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1990), pp. 17, 45 n. 58, 72, fig. 7.
Rupert Feuchtmüller, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793–1865: Leben, Schriften, Werke (Vienna and Munich: C. Brandstätter, 1996), pp. 51, 441, no. 237 (ill.).
“The European Fine Art Fair,” Weltkunst 72, 2 (2002), p. 147.
Art Institute of Chicago, Annual Report 2003–2004 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2004), pp. 16 (ill.), 33.
Laurie Winters, “Northern European Painting and Drawing,” in Hans Ottomeyer, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, and Laurie Winters, Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity, exh. cat. (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum and Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), p. 324, no. 313, fig. 313.

Milwaukee Art Museum, Biedermeier: The Invention of Simplicity, September 16, 2006–January 1, 2007, cat. 83; traveled to Vienna, Albertina, February 2–May 13, 2007; Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum, June 8–September 2, 2007.

Jäger collection; sold Galerie Leo Schidlof, Vienna, October 11–13, 1920, lot 121 as Männerporträt, to an Austrian collector [according to an email from Marcus Marschall to Martha Wolff dated July 24, 2003, copy in curatorial file]; in the possession of a female member of this family, Innsbruck, Austria, by 1957 [according to the email cited above and Grimschitz 1957]; by descent to her brother-in-law, Bad Reichenhall until 1974 [this and the following provenance until 2001 according to the email cited above]; by descent to his niece, from 1974 until 2000; by descent to her son, Vienna; Dorotheum, Vienna, May 28, 2001, lot 22; bought by a private collector and consigned to Daxer & Marschall, Munich, 2002; purchased by the Art Institute with funds donated by the Gidwitz Family Foundation, 2003.

Grimschitz, F.G. Waldmuller cat rais 1957 217

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Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

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IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

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