Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Tributes

"Portrait of Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna"
by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

"In Karlsruhe, obsequies for Franz Xaver Winterhalter were elaborate and heartfelt. It was from this city that he had set out as an unknown young painter forty years before, and to which he had returned as a European celebrity. His beloved Baden honoured him with an exhibition in October 1873. Exhibits from local collections, those of the Grand Duke of Baden, the Prince of Fürstenberg, the King of Württemberg and various private individuals, were complemented by loans from further afield. Queen Victoria lent four pictures, the early portraits of 1842 of herself and Prince Albert, Duleep Singh, and 'The First of May.' No biographer came forward to chronicle the dead man's achievement. 

In 1894, Winterhalter's nephew Franz Wild published a brief memoir, with an invaluable checklist of portraits, but the artist had to wait a further forty years before a reawakening of interest in the Second Empire brought his work once more to prominence with exhibitions in London and Paris in 1936. His name had become associated with fashionable court portraiture. Little was known about him personally, and his art was not taken seriously. It will be only after a further lapse of time that his style can be set in context, his career documented, and the full range of his achievement fairly judged."

(Excerpts from the introduction by Richard Ormund, to "Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe 1830-70.")