The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape
Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Austrian, 1793–1865)
1828
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Classification
- Painting
- 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.)
- Culture
- Austria
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Gift of Jane B. Gidwitz
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
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.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
