6. Christian Seybold Emulating Masters of the Low Countries
Lilian Ruhe
The versatile German portrait and tronie painter Christian Seybold (1695-1768) excelled in all the various styles he used to express himself during his artistic career, yet he is invariably best remembered for his meticulous, highly refined tronies in the manner of Balthasar Denner (1685-1749). Denner’s famous tronies were purchased in the mid-1720s by Emperor Charles VI (1685-1740). As admired and sought after as these precious cabinet pieces were at that time, they later increasingly became an issue of controversy within the art critical debate. The influential archaeologist and classicist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) was the first to express criticism of Denner’s detailed tronies in 1756, and of both Denner’s and Seybold’s tronies in this manner in 1759.1 In his view, these works, rather than springing from the painter’s genius, were products of diligence, in which nature was only slavishly imitated. Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn (1712-1780), a much acclaimed connoisseur of the period, immediately understood that Winckelmann’s one-sided view of Seybold’s artistry would stigmatize him as a one-trick pony and unduly overshadow his versatility, and he parried Winckelmann’s disapproval in a footnote in the same publication (in translation): ‘But this can only be understood of a certain kind of Seyboldian heads, where the spirit that the artist has shown in other heads seems to have been sacrificed to diligence. Because Seybold is known to have more than one manner’.2
To support Hagedorn’s words, and simultaneously to justify and add nuance to the inclusion of the artist in Gerson’s Nachwirkung, this contribution will not dwell too long on Seybold’s obviously successful imitation of Denner, but will focus instead on his lesser-known emulation of other, predominantly northern masters, especially on how he followed Rembrandt’s example in his self-portraiture. Seybold’s propensity to challenge the beholders of his paintings by cleverly intertwining his professional achievements with motifs from the pictorial and art literary tradition is particularly apparent in his Self-Portrait with the ‘Wienerisches Diarium’ [cover image]. An analysis of this revelatory self-portrait concludes this contribution.
Cover image
Christian Seybold
Selfportrait with the 'Wienerisches Diarium' [Viennese newspaper] of 1745, after 26 May 1745
Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, inv./cat.nr. 53406
Notes
1 Winckelmann 1756, ‘Erläuterung der Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst’, pp. 120-131, esp. p. 130; Winckelmann 1759, p. 13.
2 ‘Dieß ist aber nur von einer gewissen Art Seyboldischer Köpfe zu verstehen, wo der Geist, den der Künstler in andern Köpfen gezeiget hat, dem Fleiße aufgeopfert zu seyn scheint. Denn Seybold hat bekannter maßen mehr als eine Schilderweise’; Winckelmann 1759, p. 13; Winckelmann 1968/2002, p. 420; Ruhe 2005, p. 49; Ruhe 2018, p. 32.