4278 - Bertha Froriep, Portrait of a Gentleman

Bertha Froriep, Portrait of a Gentleman Half-length portrait of an elderly, grey-haired man with a full beard, wearing an Inverness coat with a multi-layered cape; a glazed, partially slightly impasto portrait, oil on canvas, c. 1880, signed ‘B. Froriep”, old number label “1440” on the reverse, various annotations and an illegible stamp on the canvas, signs of age, set in the original Florentine frame (with conservation issues), The inner dimensions are approx. 65 x 53 cm. Artist’s biography: German portrait and genre painter (1833, Berlin - 1920, Weimar); took her first drawing lessons with Adolf von Menzel and Eduard Magnus in Berlin; lived in Weimar from 1846; where she later studied under Friedrich Martersteig and Ferdinand Pauwels; undertook a study trip to the Netherlands in 1881-82 and to Italy in 1893; from 1870 onwards, she submitted works to the exhibitions of the Thuringian Association of Visual Artists in Jena, as well as to exhibitions in Leipzig, Kassel, Stuttgart, Magdeburg, Berlin, Dresden and in Switzerland; as the great-granddaughter of the Weimar merchant and publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747-1822), she managed the extensive family estate and lived in the ‘Bertuchhaus’ in Weimar, a member of the German Art Association, the General German Artists’ Cooperative, the Berlin Art Association and, from 1873 to 1921 [sic.], a member of the Association of Berlin Women Artists, to whose exhibitions she contributed from 1873 to 1901; honoured with the Grand Ducal Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach Medal for Art and Science; source: Thieme-Becker, Saur ‘Bio-Bibliographical Artists’ Lexicon’, Boetticher, Gabriele Oswald, ‘Bertha Froriep (1833-1920): Artist from Weimar’s ‘Silver Age’ and Guardian of the Bertuch House”, “Käthe, Paula and the Rest”, Müller-Singer, Dressler and the internet.