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ca. 1733 ca. 1741 1746 1747 1748 1750

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 3


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.

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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

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Before the 1907 Restoration and As It Looked in 1985

Is this young man really Johann Sebastian Bach?
Page 3


That it was felt necessary to alter the details of the portrait to make the face more "Bachian" is, to me at least, prima facie evidence that its discoverers had reason to believe from the outset that the face in the battered and abraded portrait that they had acquired from the Schneidermeister was not, in fact, the face of the young Johann Sebastian Bach but rather the face of a "near miss".

The history and the provenance of the painting now became a subject of intense interest.

Because it was nearest to hand, I turned first to Werner Neumann's commentary in Bilddokumente zur Lebensgeschichten Johann Sebastian Bachs. This is what I found:

"...Oil on canvas 60x44 cm with no artist's signature, but earlier with the following words on the back in a reputedly original rococo handwriting: 'Joh. Sebast. Bach / geb. d. 21 Mar. 1685 / zu Eisenach'. Found in about 1877 in the attic of a house in Erfurt, owned until 1907 by a master tailor who collected pictures and bought from him by the Angermuseum, the City Museum of Erfurt, renovated and declared by the director Alfred Overmann to be possibly a picture of Bach...." (BDL, p. 403)

In Neumann's subsequent discussion of the controversy that developed about the painting's authenticity, Heinrich Besseler's name looms large, and the Erfurt Portrait is the first of the five portraits that Besseler discusses in his monograph. Naturally, I turned it to his discussion next. His account of the history of the painting provided significantly more detail but no new revelations, with one possible exception. Besseler alludes to the article in Die Musik in which the existence of the portrait was first announced and its identication as a portrait of Bach asserted, and he mentions that the article contains a photograph of the painting as it looked before it was restored:

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However, Besseler does not reproduce the photograph in his book, and he does not appear to discuss its potential significance in his examination and evaluation of the Erfurt Portrait. One cannot help but wonder why, especially since there are twelve plates in the book, which means that there was ample room in the budget to allow for the inclusion of the "before" photograph of the Erfurt Portrait. Did Besseler simply rely on the restored painting, believing the photograph of the unrestored canvas of minimal probative value, or did the photograph of the unrestored canvas cause him to have doubts that, under the circumstances, he preferred to ignore? After all, had he decided that he had to exclude the painting from the canon, a thin book would have become even thinner, and the title would have had to have been changed to Vier Echte Bildnisse Johann Sebastian Bachs.

And, at some point, I then realized, I really would have to find out what Museumleiter Prof. Dr. Alfred Overmann had to say about the painting in his article announcing the momentous discovery.

Once again, however, I had to set aside dealing with what suddenly and irrevocably had transformed itself into the distasteful and disheartening task of discrediting one of the most famous portrait images in the Western world. The joyful task of authenticating the Weydenhammer Portrait Fragment and announcing to the world the re-appearance of the long lost Portrait of Bach that belonged to Kittel, I am thankful to write, took precedence once again. First, the original of the Weydenhammer Portrait Fragment was entrusted to my care, and then Rufus Hallmark and Raymond Erickson invited me to give the Queens College Lecture.

But, during the weeks and months of intense preparation for that historic and, for me at least, deeply moving presentation, I had the good fortune to get to know Paula D. Matthews, who had succeeded my long time friend Paula Morgan as the Music Librarian at my alma mater, Princeton University.

Paula, who quickly became as close a friend as her predecessor, reminded me that, as a Princeton alumnus, I still had the privilege of roaming through the stacks of the Music Library. (God bless Karin Trainer and the rest of the Princeton librarians! They still steadfastly decline to abandon Princeton's long-standing policy of having "open stacks"!) Paula also made it possible for me to borrow for scanning purposes that 1914 Bach Jahrbuch that was the catalyst for the initial detour to an examination of the Erfurt Portrait. Needless to say, I was, and am, immensely grateful.

At the same time, I asked Paula if, by some miracle, the Music Library had a copy of the issue of Die Musik in which the existence of the Erfurt Portrait was first announced to the world. (Die Musik was a journal that had extremely high production values; among the classical music periodicals in circulation today, almost a century later, only the early music magazine, Goldberg, equals it in quality.) Mirabile dictu, the Music Library did, and Paula graciously allowed me to borrow that, too.

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After my astonishment at the not very subtle erotically charged art work that graces the cover and the title page to the Volume had dissipated, I turned at once to Alfred Overmann's article on the Erfurt Portrait.

The photo of the unrestored canvass in Heft 6 of the 1907 Die Musik turns out to be somewhat larger than the photo that is the frontispiece of the Beyer monograph, and the photo of the restored canvass, evidently the first and the "official" one, was of equivalent size. I thereupon decided that these two images are about as level a playing ground as any scholar could want, and, unless otherwise stated, all subsequent scans of the Erfurt Portrait are taken from those two 1907 illustrations.

So, once more, I returned to the scanning bed. Here are scans of the "before and after" illustrations of the unrestored painting that appear in Heft 6 of the 1907 Die Musik:

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Here is that "before and after" comparison, shorn of captions and borders:

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Now just the heads in that "before and after" comparison:

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And now, finally, just the faces, without the distraction of hair (whether real or a perruque) and clothing:

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Alas, the verdict is unchanged. The "liberties" taken by the undeniably adept restorer are as apparent as before.

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Please click on 1092-18A-0100v.jpg  Loading 35034 bytes to return to the Index Page at The Face Of Bach.

Please click on abdyjsb2.jpg to visit the Johann Sebastian Bach Index Page at Teri Noel Towe's Homepages.

Please click on the crabby2.jpg to visit the Teri Noel Towe Welcome Page.


TheFaceOfBach@aol.com


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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ca. 1733 ca. 1741 1746 1747 1748 1750



 

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Last update: Sunday, July 02, 2017 03:52