# The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape

- By: Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Austrian, 1793–1865)
- Date: 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
- Credit line: Gift of Jane B. Gidwitz
- Museum: [Art Institute of Chicago](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/181478)
- Rights: [Public domain (CC0)](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
- Picture: https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/399332e9-94a4-64ac-4ed2-040647b2ca80/full/!1864,1080/0/default.jpg
- Who can see it: Tweens profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

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