Franz von Lenbach
(Schrobenhausen 1836 - 1904 Munich)

Landscape with a Sleeping Boy
c.1860

Oil on cardboard
26.5 x 36.8 cm

Inscribed on the back by another hand Eigenthum der Gräfin Pauline v. Kalckreuth / Prof. Franz von Lenbach fec. / aus seiner frühesten Zeit ehe / er Prof. in Weimar war and with two labels of Galerie Heinemann, Munich, stamped with the nos. 8869 and 3060 and a printed label of the frame dealer Emil Plesko, Munich.

Provenance:
Gräfin Pauline von Kalckreuth
Galerie Heinemann, Munich
Private collection, Germany

Exhibition:
Lenbach-Ausstellung im Königlichen Ausstellungsgebäude am Königsplatz, Munich 1905, no. 181, ill.
Reinhold Baumstark (ed.), Lenbach. Sonnenbilder und Porträts, Munich, Neue Pinakothek and Schack Galerie, 2004, no. 14, repr. p.52

Son of a master builder, Franz von Lenbach's first contacts to painting were through his brother, Karl August. He befriended the artist Johann Baptist Hofner who had studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich and they made sketching expeditions together on which Hofner introduced him to plein air painting. Following two semesters at the Polytechnische Schule in Augsburg and several months in the studio of the portrait painter Albert Gräfle, Lenbach entered the Akademie in Munich in 1854. Later, in 1857, he attended the classes of Karl Theodor von Piloty, who was renowned for his historical subjects. In 1860, Lenbach was offered a professorship at the Kunstschule in Weimar. Several journeys took him to Italy (1865), Spain (1867), Morocco (1868) and Vienna, where he painted several portraits, including Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, Richard Wagner, and Emperor Franz Joseph I. Upon his return to Munich in 1876, Lenbach became one of the leading and most famed German portrait painters of his time. He was elevated to the nobility in 1882.[1]

The present work relates to Lenbach's celebrated painting The Young Shepherd Sleeping in Munich, Schack-Galerie[2], dated 1860, in which the foreground figure is more prominent, whereas in our sketch, the artist gives every detail equal importance: the boy, the grass, the air, the clouds and the landscape. Together with several other known studies[3], it derives from Lenbach's painting Arch of Titus, which he began in Rome in 1858 and finished upon his return to Munich in 1860.[4] Many of those studies were executed in Aresing, Bavaria. Lenbach required his young German peasant models to get a suntan before posing as Roman boys for his Italian pictures.[5]

We thank Sonja von Baranow for confirming the attribution and for her assistance in compiling this catalogue entry.

[1] Sonja von Baranow, in: The Dictionary of Art, vol. 19, London 1996, pp.150-152.
[2] Eberhard Ruhmer et al., Schack-Galerie, Munich 1969, pp.223-226, no.11 450, pl. 145; Sonja von Baranow, Franz von Lenbach: Leben und Werk, Cologne 1986, p.99 f., no.17.
[3] Exh. cat., Franz von Lenbach, Munich 1986-87, nos. 46, 53, 58, 59, and 62.
[4] Present location unknown, see exh. cat., Lenbach-Ausstellung 1905, op. cit., no.162, pl.162.
[5] W. Wyl, Franz von Lenbach - Gespräche und Erinnerungen, Stuttgart and Leipzig 1904, p.40.