1285 - Anton Raphael Mengs, Umkreis

Anton Raphael Mengs, Umkreis Anton Raphael Mengs, circle of Self Portrait (with a Portfolio of Sketches) Oil on canvas (relined). 42.5 x 32 cm. Provenance Christie’s, London, 19.2.1954, lot 108 (as: A. R. Mengs: Portrait of the Artist). - Dorotheum, Vienna, 12.9.1957, lot 78. - Ruef, Landshut, 28.9.2009, lot 4. - German private collection. Literature S. Roettgen: Anton Raphael Mengs 1728–1779, 2 vols., Munich 1999 and 2003, vol. 1, p. 350, no. 282 WK 1. With two old hand-written labels on the reverse: "from the Collection of the late / […] Hughes […]“ and "Head of a Poet / William Hogarth". The model for the present painting is the impressive, albeit unfinished, “Self-Portrait with a Portfolio of Sketches”, which is now in the collection of the Dukes of Alba in Madrid. In this painting, Mengs confidently portrayed himself standing in three-quarter length, a format traditionally reserved for portraits of members of the nobility. Our painting, by contrast, from Mengs’s circle, focuses on the artist’s head, with his gaze directed into the distance to the right. In her catalogue raisonné of Anton Raphael Mengs’s works, Steffi Roettgen characterised our painting as a “high-quality repetition of the head and bust. Probably a work from Mengs’s circle.”