The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape

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FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

This portrait’s sitter, a famous Viennese actor named Maximilian Korn, poses elegantly in fine garments with his finger holding his place in a book, as if he has just been interrupted while reading. Artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, no stranger to the theater himself, honed his skill as a painter by copying well-known works in Dresden, Rome, and Vienna while on tour with his wife, Katharina Weidner, a successful opera singer. Here, Waldmüller updated the traditional Renaissance portrait with a landscape background by integrating the sitter into his organic surroundings: Korn leans on a mossy rock and basks in the same sunlight that illuminates the distant mountains.

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