Anton von Maron Vienna 1733 - 1808 Rome

Arch. Andrea Busiri Vici D'Arcevia, Rome;
Thence by descent.

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Il Settecento a Roma, 19 March - 31 May 1959, no. 373, lent by A. Busiri Vici;
Rome, Museo di Roma (Palazzo Braschi), Artisti austriaci a Roma dal Barocco alla Secessione, March - April 1972, no. 228.

C. Maltese, in Il Settecento a Roma, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 19 March - 31 May 1959, p. 151, cat. no. 373, reproduced plate 72;
B. Skinner, "The "Settecento a Roma" Exhibition", in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CI, no. 676-7, July - August 1959, p. 292, reproduced fig. 50;
A. Busiri Vici, "Ritratti di Nathaniel Dance tra ruderi e salotti", in Capitolium, nos. 7-8, 1965, pp. 384-391, footnote 17;
Artisti austriaci a Roma dal barocco alla secessione, exhibition catalogue, Rome, Palazzo Braschi, March - April 1972, p. 165, cat. no. 228;
S. Rudolph ed., La pittura del '700 a Roma, Milan 1983, reproduced fig. 448;
A. Busiri Vici, "Thomas Jenkins fra l'arte e l'antiquariato", in L'Urbe, nos. 5-6, 1985, p. 158, reproduced fig. 1;
A. Ryszkiewicz, "Un souvenir polonais du Grand Tour", in Bulletin du Musée Nationale de Varsovie, no. 4, 1990, pp. 86, 92, reproduced fig. 4;
G. Sestieri, Repertorio della pittura romana della fine del Seicento e del Settecento, Turin 1994, vol. I, p. 121;
F. Petrucci, in I volti del Potere, exh. cat., Ariccia, Palazzo Chigi, 24 March - 20 May 2004, p. 23, reproduced fig. 46.

Though Austrian by birth and a member of the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, Von Maron left Vienna for Italy where he settled, in Rome, in 1755. He entered the studio of Anton Raphael Mengs (1737-79) and rapidly became his favourite pupil; a relationship further strengthened by Von Maron’s marriage to Mengs’ sister, Theresa Concordia, in 1765. When Mengs was appointed court painter to Charles III of Spain and left Rome for Madrid in 1761, Von Maron took on many of the commissions which would once have gone to Mengs, and he quickly emerged as one of the leading painters in Rome. He joined the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1766, the same year in which he painted portraits of Leopold Friedrich Franz, Duke of Anhald, and of Sir Robert Clive. The following year he signed and dated this ambitious double portrait and in 1768 Sir William and Lady Hamilton are known to have sat to him, though that painting remains untraced. It was during the latter half of the 1760s that Von Maron established his reputation as a portrait-painter, meeting the needs of the Grand Tourists and, in particular, of English gentlemen passing through Rome, much as Pompeo Batoni had been doing since the 1740s. Indeed Batoni (1708-1787), who was Von Maron’s principal competitor in the genre, is today generally held in much higher regard than Von Maron (though this was not necessarily the case in their own day). This point is clearly illustrated by a comment made by Robert Grimston of Neswick Hall, who sat to Von Maron in 1768, in a portrait which today belongs to Sir Tatton Sykes (reproduced in Masterpieces from Yorkshire Houses, exh. cat., London, Sotheby’s, 29 January – 20 March 1994, cat. no. 46). While writing home to his guardian, John Grimston of Kilnwick, Robert stated that he had sat for a full-length portrait “to the best painter here and who is now reckond as good a painter as any in Europe” (Grimston MSS; cited by H. Brigstocke, in Masterpieces from Yorkshire Houses (op. cit.), p. 84). Grimston’s portrait is conceived in the same informal manner as in the present picture, whereby the sitter is shown in a verdant landscape reminiscent of the Roman campagna and a recognisable monument (in the Grimston portrait the Colosseum, in the present portrait the Arch of Constantine) is introduced into the background to illustrate the sitters’ artistic and archeological interest during the Grand Tour.