Lot 317: Gottfried Eichler the Elder (Lippstädt/Meissen 1677 - 1759 Augsburg)

Portrait of Anna Barbara and Gottfried Eichler, inscribed on the reverse Anna Barbara Reichlern geb. 1714 d. 6. Juni Gottfried Eichler geb. 1713 d. 30. August von ihrem Vatter Gottfried Eichler A. 1725 gemalt Aug. Vindel (icorum-Augsburg), oil on canvas, 47 x 39 cm, framed, (Wo)

Gottfried Eichler was apprenticed to Johann Heiss in Augsburg. Later he travelled to Italy and visited Venice, Padua, Florence, and Rome. In Rome he became a student of Benedetto Luti and Carlo Maratta and met the Bohemian painter Johann Kupetzki, his senior by ten years. The two painters went to Vienna together in 1706 or 1707, where they worked predominantly as portraitists. Through their work they succeeded in establishing contacts with the court and its circles. Eichler portrayed members of the Imperial family, foreign princes as well as members of important families of the Viennese nobility and bourgeoisie. Later he was active at various courts in Germany and in 1711 returned to Augsburg. He became one of the most productive artists in town and executed, for example, an altarpiece with a Last Supper for the Church of the Discalced Friars as well as numerous portraits of Augsburg citizens and clergymen. From 1742 to his death in 1759 Eichler was the director of the Imperial Art Academy and was appointed Palatine court painter. The present work, a masterful double portrait of his children, suggests that the family was quite wealthy. His eleven-year-old daughter is dressed in a lace-trimmed blouse, while her brother, one year her junior, wears a red turbanlike bonnet. Both are bent over a leather-bound Baroque devotional book. The painting shows a rather intimate scene which was not meant to be seen by a public audience. It seems as if the father surprised his children reading and captured this very moment in the picture. The colourful clothes of the children are set off against the neutral dark background. Gottfried Eichler's son later was to become a renowned painter himself. He was trained by his father and completed his education in Vienna, Nuremberg and probably also in the Netherlands.