6505 - Henry, Suzette

Henry, Suzette Portrait of the artist Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki seated at a table in front of a sketchpad and a pencil, holding a magnifying glass. Oil on canvas, mounted on board. 80.5 x 66 cm. Signed lower right “S. Henri geb. Chodo[...]”. Circa 1800. This portrait, painted by Suzette Henry, the second-eldest daughter of Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, was only recently rediscovered on the art market. Both the identity of the subject and the artist’s attribution had been lost. Expert cleaning of the painting’s surface revealed the signature, which made a definitive attribution to the artist possible. Susanne Chodowiecka, known as Suzette, married Henry, was without a doubt her father’s most faithful successor. Like him, she created series of moralizing genre paintings depicting bourgeois life. The themes of “marriage” and “upbringing,” for example, to which she devoted herself extensively, drew from her father’s repertoire of motifs. He had also pioneered the narrative logic of contrasting virtue and vice in his now-famous series of paintings. Just as Daniel Chodowiecki was an outstanding portraitist—a fact that is perhaps not sufficiently recognized alongside his depictions of the life, thought, and feelings of the bourgeois society of his time, as well as his contemporary historical paintings—so too did Suzette achieve highly respectable results in this field. Her teachers were the very best one could imagine: After her initial training under her father, she became a student of Johann Christoph Frisch, Berlin’s leading portraitist at the time, and finally of Anton Graff in Dresden, the preeminent portrait painter in Germany, with whom her father was a close friend. Even after her marriage to Jean Henry, a Huguenot preacher and later curator of Berlin’s Cabinet of Antiquities and Coins, the painter continued her artistic work uninterrupted. Where she surpassed her father was in the scale of her work. Chodowiecki is the preeminent master of the small format. Suzette, on the other hand, adhered to the standard of portrait painting and painted life-size works; she often chose a wider frame than the mere bust, and also painted large canvases for family portraits. Suzette Henry painted her father in half-length in this painting as well as in another portrait, likely created somewhat earlier, which is in the collection of the Berlin Museum. Given Chodowiecki’s reputation—as director of the Academy, a sought-after engraver, and arguably the most widely collected printmaker in Germany at the time—and considering the artist’s active social life, the number of portrait paintings of him is remarkably small. Apart from the two portraits by his daughter, there was a portrait by Frisch, a detailed copy of which is preserved in the “Temple of Friendship” at the Gleimhaus in Halberstadt, and otherwise only the portrait mentioned above by Graff, of which several copies have survived alongside the portrait of Chodowiecki’s wife. The artist is seated at a table in a gray coat with a striking shoulder collar, leaning over a sheet of paper. His face, viewed in profile, is turned toward the viewer; his expression is animated, and his lips are subtly moving as if speaking. The scope of Chodowiecki’s work is widely admired. An early biographer of the artist reports that, during the many visits he received, the artist never interrupted his work, yet was simultaneously able to devote his attention to his guest and engage in lively conversation. It is precisely this moment that the present portrait of old age seems to illustrate through the pronounced turn of the face. In this respect, it is closely related to Graff’s masterpiece, created in January 1800. As both the artist’s tools of the trade and attributes of an artist’s portrait, Chodowiecki is depicted with a drawing pencil and a magnifying glass. Thus, the painting can also be identified iconographically as an artist’s portrait, just like the other portrait of his father painted by the artist herself. That portrait shows the master reclining in a chair, gazing at the viewer from beneath heavy eyelids, one hand resting on a folio portfolio that he holds on his leg. In terms of solemnity, the present portrait is on par with it; in terms of cheerful warmth, however, this one far surpasses it. Perhaps it is the artist’s latest painted portrait. Dr. Reimar Lacher Lit.: Reimar F. Lacher: Sitten, Satire, Aufklärung. Kalenderkupfer von Daniel Chodowiecki. Göttingen, 2026, p. 19, no. I.1, with ill. - We ask that you request condition reports for the lots, as the condition is only indicated in the catalog in exceptional cases. - Please ask for condition reports for individual lots, as the condition is usually not mentioned in the catalog.