How Willhelm Leibl conjures a facial landscape from the simmering contrast between skin and hair
The appellate court judge Stenglein is long forgotten; even modern internet search engines fail to turn up a trace of him. And yet, his visage will endure for ages, because the great Wilhelm Leibl painted him in 1871. And this portrait is a testament above all to the artist’s technical mastery, his psychological insight, his masterful treatment of color. And he gave the judge eyes that are so vivid and penetrating that they cannot be forgotten.
“Leibl was no landscape painter. First and foremost, he was a painter of human beings,” wrote Hermann Beenken. “Yet nature was to him a mosaic of colorfully material values.” In our portrait, it is first and foremost the contrast between the skin, which Leibl summons forth from hundreds of finely nuanced flesh-tones, and the hair on the chin and head — the smooth plane of the skin against the fine curls of the hair, the colors against an opalescent sea of gray tones. This contrast is the central focus of the picture, and that is why the background is as black as the judge’s coat. They are merely the page upon which Leibl makes the face a testing ground for his virtuosic depiction of materiality. The dark red of the lips commands the center.
The “Bildnis des Appellationsrats Stenglein” (Portrait of the Appellate Court Judge Stenglein) is among the commissioned works that Leibl completed in 1871 after his return from Paris, where he had drawn inspiration that would considerably impact his future work as an artist. It can be regarded part of a series that includes the Cologne portrait of the furniture manufacturer Pallenberg and that of Mayor Klein in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. During Leibl’s sojourn in Munich — his second — he created only a few paintings; no more than 27 are recorded for the period between 1871 and 1873, and they are almost exclusively portraits. It was an especially gloomy time for Leibl, who was given to brooding in general. His father had died in October of 1870, which depressed the 27-year-old’s spirits immensely. And yet the portraits from this period have a special power of suggestion, because Leibl’s painting style became looser and the people in his paintings more alive. The French art he had seen in Paris was beginning to simmer beneath the surfaces of his own canvases. But of course, as was always the case with Leibl, it was doing so in a very subtle way. Leibl’s Paris sojourn was surely a necessary prerequisite for him to attain the tremendous confidence and painterly strength that we see in the portrait of the “Appellationsrat Stenglein.”
In fact, it was not so much these portraits of the grand bourgeoisie that made Leibl famous as it was his portrayal of the rural population of upper Bavaria — the domestic servants, hunters, and churchwomen that he depicted with steely rigor and detached realism fifteen to twenty years later. No German painter since Holbein actually had captured faces as documents of human history in this way, without sentimentality and yet with great care. Nevertheless, Leibl’s mastery as a painter already is fully evident in his best work from the early 1870s, including this portrait.
The Mosse collection also included a different version of this portrait (a study), which is stored today in the Alte Nationalgalerie (Inventory No. NG 818) and demonstrates that Leibl captured the portrait’s subject from several different perspectives. Apparently, Leibl found the frontal perspective of the study too confrontational for his final execution of the portrait. Our painting, which has more clearly defined lines and a more stringent structure than the one in the National Gallery, likely will have been created immediately afterward, as Emil Waldmann noted in the corrected second edition of his catalogue of Leibl’s works. It shows the appellate court judge Stenglein in a three-quarter portrait, facing toward the left. It was once assumed that Leibl changed the angle of the face in response to an objection by the sitter. However, it can be demonstrated that Leibl employed the same practice in his two portraits of the Countess Treuberg, so perhaps it rather affords us an insight into his artistic practice. Apparently, he needed to paint first from a direct frontal perspective in order to arrive at a final composition he felt was coherent.
The photograph taken on April 30th, 1932, in the Mosse-Palais is one of the extremely rare images that transmit an impression of how pictures were arranged in the collection of the legendary Rudolf Mosse. It shows the privy councilor Geheimrat Heck and Berthold Israel standing in front of the portrait by Leibl at a reception hosted by Mosse’s Berlin daily, the Berliner Tageblatt¸ for that year’s “World Trade Week” in Berlin. Today it is unimaginable that just two years after the picture was taken — thus shortly after the seizure of power by the National Socialists — the entire Mosse Collection, including this painting, would be sold at a forced auction in Berlin. It is brutally clear evidence of just how quickly the National Socialists sought to destroy the Jewish foundations of German culture. Rudolf Mosse’s daughter and son-in-law, Felicia Mosse and Hans Lachmann-Mosse, emigrated as early as in 1933.
The other black-and-white image is an excerpt from the catalogue published by the Rudolf Lepke auction house for the sale on May 24th, 1931. It shows a copy of the Leibl painting listed as “Item 1;” according to the artistic understanding of the early 1930s, it was the most significant painting in Mosse’s collection. The 10,000 Reichsmark that it fetched at auction also reflect this. It took almost 100 years until Wilhelm Leibl regained the esteem among connoisseurs in which Rudolf Mosse had once held him.
Florian Illies