RKD STUDIES

Christian Seybold is only rarely featured in surveys of 18th-century art. Owing to the large number of self-portraits he produced, his œuvre is often discussed in the literature that is exclusively devoted to this subgenre. He is rightfully included in several publications dealing with the aftereffects of 17th-century Dutch painting on 18th-century German art. The most important comprehensive studies of this kind, which precede Elisabeth Herrmann-Fichtenau’s dissertation (1983), were written by Hermann Leber (1924) and Horst Gerson (1942).¹

In the latter one can read about the protagonist (in translation): ‘In the work of Christian Seybold (1697-1768) from Mainz, who lived in Vienna from 1740 onwards, one sometimes notices reminiscences of Dutch fijnschilders, especially when he renounced official portraiture for once [‘wenn er dem offiziellen Bildnisstil einmal entsagt’] and dedicated himself to genre painting, for which he sought inspiration in the masters of Haarlem’.² Elsewhere, Gerson explains: ‘The realistic, in contrast with the decorative, consisted of a painstakingly accurate design, which could degenerate into pedantry. Balthasar Denner and Christian Seybold belong to the first and most consistent artists in this category’.³ Although Gerson mentioned Seybold again in his chapter about the Swiss in relation to fijnschilders who used a Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro, he characterised Seybold in only a few lines as a painter indebted to Dutch fijnschilders and painters from Haarlem, who painted realistic, instead of decorative portraits and genre scenes.

The ‘painstakingly accurate design’ Gerson described, is better known as Porenmalerei, a hyper realistic way of expressing textures that literally reproduces details down to the level of the pores in zoomed-in tronies, especially of the elderly [1-2], but also of youngsters, as attested by one of the two tronies by Seybold now in London, which were both previously misattributed to Denner [3-4].

Seybold borrowed this manner from the North German portrait and tronie painter Balthasar Denner, who was the first and most famous exponent of this meticulous style: these kinds of tronies were even termed Porendenners [5-6].⁴ Strictly speaking, the use of this term is anachronistic, as it was only at the end of the 19th century that it came into being in respect of Denner’s extremely detailed tronies. Apart from the fact that the analogy with pores was not an uncommon qualification for detailed portraits,⁵ in this case the designation Porendenner is probably engrafted upon Johann Basilii Küchelbecker’s account of the imperial art collection from 1730, in which he identified this characteristic in Denner’s tronies of old people: ‘One does not see a brush stroke at all, and yet all pores are expressed’.⁶

1
Christian Seybold
Tronie of an old woman with a green head scarf
Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, inv./cat.nr. 2095

2
Christian Seybold
Tronie of an old man with a speckled fur hat
Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, inv./cat.nr. 2094

Denner, in turn, cannot be seen in isolation from the examples of the Leiden fijnschilders who were avidly collected, especially at the German courts. Denner was even included in the Dutch school of painters by some of his contemporaries.⁷ Even in his own times, Seybold was seen as an epigone of Denner, and he went down in history as such. For example, his local newspaper, the Wienerisches Diarium, described him in an art supplement from 1763 as (in translation) ‘an imitator of Balthasar Denner’.⁸ Both men’s fame, however, quickly waned after 1759 under the influence of Winckelmann and other critics, who did not recognize this punctilious, supposedly literal mimesis as ‘true art’, but branded it as a slavish imitation of nature and thus lacking genius.⁹ Although Hagedorn did not think much of Winckelmann’s knowledge of the art of painting,¹⁰ the latter’s influence nevertheless heralded a new taste that endured for decades afterwards.

Like Winckelmann, Gerson presented Seybold mainly as an imitator of Denner and the Leiden fijnschilders, which consequently put a spin on the already distorted image of the painter, which persisted for a long time. Moreover, most of Gerson’s information about Seybold has since been proven to be erroneous. Contradicting the data in his Nachwirkung, it transpired that the portrait and tronie painter was born neither in 1697 nor in Mainz; he had probably derived this incorrect information from Hagedorn’s compact biography of Seybold.¹¹ Nor can Seybold, as Gerson claimed, only be traced in Vienna from 1740 onwards. He most likely based this assumption on Hermann Leber’s dissertation, which also mentioned 1740 as the year when Seybold arrived in Vienna; neither author refers to the source of this year.

With regard to Seybold’s œuvre, Gerson worked with untenable – and often incomprehensible – attributions. A genre piece that does not meet any of the stylistic criteria required for an attribution to Seybold, and which even lacks the slightest indication connecting it to the painter’s immediate environment, led Gerson to a problematic comparison between Seybold and the Haarlem painters [7], as he presented it uncritically as an example of the master’s work. There is also a misjudgement regarding a (currently lost) self-portrait by Seybold. Although Gerson was aware of a genre piece by Seybold in Budapest [8], he published this stylistically very closely related self-portrait as a work by Balthasar Denner [9]. When this self-portrait was in the collection of François Tronchin (1704-1798) of Geneva, it was already misidentified as a work by Denner.¹² Currently at least three copies of it are known,¹³ and most recently a reduced-scale version of the work appeared on the art market in 2013 [10].

Gerson can hardly be blamed for working with erroneous data, as by 1942, very little had been published about the painter outside of Vienna and Dresden, and the biographical material that was available was apparently not accessible to him at the time.¹⁴ Partly because of its inclusion in Gerson’s compendium, Seybold’s name has acquired a permanent position in modern art historiography. Most of his works can indeed be understood as particularly clever ‘Nachwirkungen’ of mostly Dutch and Flemish colleagues from the 17th and early 18th centuries. Horst Gerson was one of the first acclaimed modern art historians to pay attention to this aspect.

7
Anonymous
A man smoking a pipe and drinking wine, sitting on a bench, next to him a boy
canvas, oil paint 44 x 34 cm
Heinrich Hahn (Frankfurt am Main) 1937-06-03 - 1937-06-04, nr. 119

8
Christian Seybold
Laughing man with a brawn (porkcheese), dated 1760
Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, inv./cat.nr. 433