The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape

Description

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.

Provenance

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.