The Portrait in Erfurt Alleged to Depict Bach, the Weimar Concertmeister - Is this young man really Johann Sebastian Bach? Pages
at The Face Of Bach
Page 4
The Face Of Bach
This remarkable photograph is not a computer generated composite; the original of the Weydenhammer Portrait Fragment, all that
remains of the portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach that belonged to his pupil Johann Christian Kittel, is resting gently on the surface
of the original of the 1748 Elias Gottlob Haussmann Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach.
1748 Elias Gottlob Haussmann Portrait, Courtesy of William H. Scheide, Princeton, New Jersey
Weydenhammer Portrait Fragment, ca. 1733, Artist Unknown, Courtesy of the Weydenhammer Descendants
Photograph by Teri Noel Towe
©Teri Noel Towe, 2001, All Rights Reserved
The Portrait in Erfurt Alleged to Depict Bach, the Weimar Concertmeister
Before the 1907 Restoration and As It Looked in 1985
Is this young man really Johann Sebastian Bach?
Page 4
Next, I turned to Prof. Dr. Overmann's short article announcing the existence of the painting:
Besseler clearly took his statement of the provenance directly from Prof. Dr. Overmann's account, but like his source, Besseler
begs an important question. If the painting had an inscription on the back in a Rococo hand identifying the subject as Johann
Sebastian Bach, and giving the date and the town of birth as well, why was that inscription not preserved or, at the very least,
photographed or traced? That the physical evidence of the painting's provenance was not preserved is suspect, particularly since no
explanation of why it was not preserved is offered.
Throughout the brief article, Prof. Dr. Overmann is careful, however, in presenting the best case that he can for the authenticity of
the painting. Among other things, he cautiously discusses the possibility that the Erfurt Portrait is the lost Kittel portrait. Even if it
were an accurate depiction of the facial features of Johann Sebastian Bach, the Erfurt Portrait could not be the portrait of Bach that
belonged to Kittel. Why is explained in detail in the Queens College Lecture, but suffice it to say that the Erfurt Portrait fails a most
important test, as Dr. Overmann acknowledges near the end of his article: It does not match the one description that we have of the
lost Kittel portrait. In his 1850 monograph on Bach, Carl Ludwig Hilgenfeldt catalogues the various portraits of Bach of which he
had knowledge. In describing the portrait that belonged to Kittel, Hilgenfeldt wrote: "... ein Brustbild, Bach im Staatskleide
darstellend". Hilgenfeldt's description of the appearance of the painting that belonged to Kittel, is, to the best of my knowledge,
unique. The specific statement that the portrait is a bust portrait and, more importantly, that it depicts Bach in official regalia of one
kind or another sets the portrait that belonged to Kittel apart from every other known authentic image.
Not only is the young man who is depicted in the Erfurt "Brustbild" not Bach, but also he is not "Bach im Staatskleide darstellend".
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Copyright, Teri Noel Towe, 2000 , 2002
Unless otherwise credited, all images of the Weydenhammer Portrait: Copyright, The Weydenhammer Descendants, 2000
All Rights Reserved
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