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Lot Essay
Over the course of his career, the Austrian artist Moritz von Schwind remained one of the central figures in Germanic Romanticism, leaving behind an extensive œuvre that found inspiration in myths and literature, as well as in the artist’s own life and the many prominent personalities he knew and befriended. The present work belongs to the latter category: it is an autograph and coloured tracing of one section of a drawing which von Schwind made in 1862 in honour of his friend, the distinguished composer Franz Lachner (1803-1890) on the occasion of the 25-year jubilee of Lachner’s appointment as conductor at the court opera in Munich; the drawing on which the tracing is based is since 1930 part of the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich (inv. G 2091/1; see F. Gross in Moritz von Schwind. Meister der Spätromantik, exhib. cat., Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, and Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste, 1996-1997, nos. 400-401, ill.). Known as the ‘Lachnerrolle’ (Lachner scroll), the drawing depicts in humorous fashion several stages of Lachner’s life in a work more than twelve metre wide; in the section offered here, considered the highpoint of the entire work (F. Haack, M. von Schwind, Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1898, p. 123), depicts his love life, from his first acquaintance with the Royko family in Vienna, to his betrothal to one of the daughters, Julie. In a first scene between garlands, Lachner can be seen playing the piano with Ludwig van Beethoven; in the scene to its right, Lachner, von Schwind and their common friend Franz Schubert bring a serenade to Lachner’s future wife. A delightful record of von Schwind’s rich life, facility as a draughtsman and sense of humour, the drawing is all the more precious to us today for the guest appearances by two of the world’s most beloved composers.