Franz Xaver Winterhalter Art for Sale at Auction

Painter, Lithographer, Landscape painter, b. 1805 - d. 1873

(b Black Forrest, Germany, 1805; d Frankfort, Germany, 1873) German Painter. Winterhalter was born to a peasant family in Germany's Black Forest. He obtained a scholarship to study at the prestigious Munich Academy at the age of nineteen. In the early 1830’s, he traveled to Italy; executing numerous drawings and watercolors, which would provide a store of imagery for future paintings. After settling in France in 1834, he began to exhibit paintings at the Paris Salon; in 1836 he won a second-class medal for a picture of a Neopolitan fisherman's family. By the 1850s and 60s, Franz Xavier Winterhalter was celebrated as the leading portraitist of Europe's nobility and royalty. His elegant, flattering likenesses of Victoria of Britain, Louis Philippe and Napoleon III of France, Isabella of Spain, and the royal families of Russia and Germany remain among the principal records of his era. (Credit: Sotheby’s, New York, 19th Century European Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures, May 1, 1999, lot 83)