Self-Portrait Franz Eybl

Franz Eybl was a student of Johann Baptist Lampi and Peter Krafft at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna but was later one of a group of artists who helped steer rigid classicism in a new direction. There was huge contemporary demand for Eybl’s bourgeois genre paintings and portraits. His portraiture was greatly influenced by the Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn, as can be seen in the self-portrait by Eybl preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, and most obviously in the dramatic use of shadow that was alien to the Biedermeier style.
The face of the fashionably attired young man is lit from above, with the result that the brim of his grey hat casts a shadow over his eyes. While the head has been executed in meticulous detail, the body and clothing are sketchy, and the shadow in the background is no more than hatching. The work was painted in around 1840 and may have been a preliminary study for a smaller self-portrait using a different colour palette – presumably the painting that now hangs in the Belvedere in Vienna.

Bianka Izsák-Boda