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 5
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 5
While Prof. Dr. Overmann appears to be quite candid about the damage to the face of the portrait's subject, he is not especially
forthcoming with respect to the details of the restoration process. Furthermore, if my reading of the article is correct, he builds his
case for the authenticity of the painting referring only to the restored form of the portrait. He does, however, tells us what his
absolute standards of comparison are. At the beginning of the last paragraph of the first page of the article, Prof. Dr. Overmann
specifically mentions the Haussmann Portrait in the Thomasschule and the skull, which had been exhumed in 1894. The Haussmann
Portrait in the Thomasschule, of course, is the 1746 Haussmann Portrait, which, in 1907, still had not been cleansed of all of the
overpaint applied to it by the three different restorers who had worked on it during the second half of the 19th century. In 1907, the
painting looked like this:
The facial features in Schönfelder's 1895 restoration of the painting were significantly different from those of the 1914 Kuhn
restoration, the version with which most of us have been intimately familiar since childhood. Here, on the left, is a close up of the
head of the 1746 Haussmann, as restored by Schönfelder in 1895, with the equivalent detail from a 1914 photograph of the portrait
after it had been cleaned and restored by Kuhn on the right:
Perhaps the most notable difference, at least for our present purposes, is the sharp boundary between light and shadow that outlines
Bach's left cheekbone. How Schönfelder and Kuhn could have reached such disparate results becomes much more understandable
when one remembers that, during the two decades between the Schönfelder Restoration in 1895 and the Kuhn Restoration in 1914,
one portrait of Bach that previously had been accepted as genuine was discredited and discredited completely:
Obviously, a detailed discussion of this image, which I call the Breitkopf portrait because it was acquired by that venerable
publishing firm in the late 19th century, is peripheral to this examination of the Erfurt Portrait. Suffice it to say that this oil painting
came with a verbal provenance that alleged that it had been acquired from the Estate or from the heirs of one of Bach's
granddaughters, and, for many years, it was attributed to Elias Gottlob Haussmann and was considered to be the portrait that was
known to have belonged to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (the 1748 Haussmann Portrait). The Breitkopf Portrait is included among the
portraits that were used for reference during the examination of Bach's skull by Wilhelm His and his colleagues in 1895, and it
clearly influenced Schönfelder when he "restored" the lower left jaw of the 1746 Haussmann Portrait. By 1914, however, when
Kurzwelly and Kuhn undertook their restoration of the 1746 Haussmann Portrait, the Breitkopf Portrait had been recognized for
what it is, an early 19th century, posthumous portrait that clearly is derived from the S. G. Kütner print of 1774. Like the Kütner
print, the Breitkopf Portrait is a "flopped" image, that is the mirror image of the model from which it was derived, because the artist
drew "directly" from the reference image, the model, to the plate or to the canvass, as the case may be:
The comparison of just the heads of the two images makes the point even more clearly:
The comparison also makes it clear that the anonymous painter who created the Breitkopf Portrait did not do all that good a job of
copying Bach's facial features as they are depicted in the Kütner print. And, in particular, he misread the contour of Bach's "right"
cheekbone.
But, as I so often do, I am getting too far afield, as the saying goes!
Prof. Dr. Overmann specifically mentions Bach's skull as well as the 1746 Haussmann Portrait in his discussion of the Erfurt
Portrait. Here, then, are the head of the Schönfelder restoration of the 1746 Haussmann Portrait, the head of the Erfurt Portrait in its
unrestored state, and a frontal view of the skull:
The skull really adds little to the discussion, but, when the restored form of the Erfurt Portrait is added to the equation and the skull
is removed
,
the message is clear to all who care to heed it: The outline of the left cheek bone and jaws in the restored form of the Erfurt Portrait
has been subtly "adjusted" and carefully and deliberately matched to the outline of the left cheekbone of the 1746 Haussmann
Portrait as restored by Schönfelder, a contour that subsequent scholarship and investivation has shown to be an inaccurate and
inexact restoration of the original.
No matter how well intentioned it may have been (and, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions!), the subtle
"realignment" of the outline of the cheekbone was -- and is -- a deception, a deception that becomes all the more obvious when one
substitutes the 1748 Haussmann Portrait (significantly, a painting that Besseler rejects categorically as both unreliable and
unauthentic when it is precisely the opposite!) for the 1746 Haussmann Portrait as restored by Schõnfelder:
Bach simply did not have the "high" and prominent cheek bones that the as yet unidentified sitter for the Erfurt Portrait had!
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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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