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Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Written on March 19, 2010 – 12:28 pm | by admin |

Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Franz Xaver Winterhalter (20 April 1805 – 8 July 1873) was a German painter and lithographer, known for his portraits of royalty in the mid-nineteenth century. His name has become associated with fashionable court portraiture.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter was born in the small village of Menzenschwand (now part of St. Blasien) in the Black Forest, Grand-Duchy of Baden on 20 April 1805. He was the sixth child of Fidel Winterhalter (1773-1863), a farmer and resin producer in the village, and his wife Eva Meyer (1765-1838), a member of a long established Menzenschwand family. His father was of peasant stock and was a powerful influence in his life. Of the eight brothers and sisters, only four survived infancy. Throughout his life, Franz Xaver remained very close to his family in particular to his brother Hermann (1808-1891), who was also a painter.
After attending school at a Benedictine monastery in St.Blasien, Winterhalter left Menzenschwand in 1818 at the age of thirteen to study drawing and engraving. He trained as a draughtsman and lithographer in the workshop of Karl Ludwig Schüler (1785–1852) in Freiburg. In 1823, at the age of eighteen, he went to Munich, sponsored by the industrialist Baron von Eichtal (1775-1850). In 1825, he was granted a stipend by Ludwig I, Grand Duke of Baden (1763-1830) and began a course of study at the Academy of Arts in Munich with Peter von Cornelius (1783-1867), whose academic methods made him uncomfortable. Winterhalter found a more congenial mentor in the fashionable portraitist Joseph Stieler (1781-1858). During this time, he supported himself working as lithographer.
Winterhalter entered court circles when in 1828 he became drawing master to Sophie Margravine of Baden, at Karlsruhe. His opportunity to establish himself beyond southern Germany came in 1832 when he was able to travel to Italy, 1833–1834, with the support of Grand Duke Leopold of Baden. In Rome he composed romantic genre scenes in the manner of Louis-Leopold Robert and attached himself to the circle of the director of the French Academy, Horace Vernet. On his return to Karlsruhe, he painted the portraits of the Grand Duke Leopold of Baden and his wife, and was appointed painter to the grand-ducal court.
Nevertheless, he left Baden to move to France where his Italian genre scene Il dolce Farniente attracted notice at the Salon of 1836.
In Paris, Winterhalter quickly became fashionable. He was appointed court painter of Louis-Philippe, the king of the French, who commissioned him to paint individual portraits of his large family. Winterhalter would execute more than thirty commissions for him.
Concerning Winterhalter’s method of working, it is thought that, practised as he was at drawing and representing figures, he painted directly onto the canvas without making preliminary studies. He frequently decided upon the dress and pose of the sitter. His style was suave, cosmopolitan and plausible. Many of the portraits were copied in his workshop or reproduced as lithographs.

Queen Victoria, 1842
Oil on canvas,
Christopher Wood Gallery, London, UK ▼