Lot 1140 | Franz Seraph von Lenbach | Group Portrait of the Sons of Pringsheim: Heinz, Peter, Klaus and Erik Pringsheim in Childhood

LENBACH, FRANZ SERAPH VON
1836 Schrobenhausen - 1904 Munich

Title: Group Portrait of the Sons of Pringsheim: Heinz, Peter, Klaus and Erik Pringsheim in Childhood.
Oil study.
Date: 1891.
Technique: Oil over pencil on canvas.
Measurement: 72,5 x 123cm.

Literature:
D. Heißerer: Die wiedergefundene Pracht. Franz von Lenbach, die Familie Pringsheim und Thomas Mann, Göttingen 2009, p. 53ff. with ill.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany;
acquired 2008 from the estate of the artist.

In Munich at the end of the 19th century, a close friendship connected the painter royalty Franz von Lenbach with the mathematician and art collector Alfred Pringsheim and his wife Hedwig. After Lenbach painted a portrait of their daughter Katia together with her mother in 1891, he planned a companion piece featuring the sons and their father, which Hedwig mentions in her diary (cf. literature). Unfortunately, the group portrait was never executed; the preliminary studies survived the passage of time, rolled up in the artist's estate. Typical of Lenbach's working method is that, although the sessions mentioned in the diary did take place in the painter's studio, he did not draw directly from the model. During these sessions, photographs were first taken, from which Lenbach then made his studies on cardboard or canvas and subsequently executed them in oil.