(Stockholm 1697–1776 Munich) Portrait of an elegant lute player, oil on canvas, 132 x 111 cm, framed

Provenance: ex Ivar Kreuger Collection, Stockholm (1932). The present painting is listed as an autograph work by the famous Bavarian court painter in Carl Hernmack’s catalogue raisonné (C. Hernmarck, Georges Desmarées, Stockholm 1932, cat. no. 178, fig. 36). The work, which was only recently rediscovered in a South Swedish private collection, impressively demonstrates why the Swedish-born Desmarées is considered one of the most influential and significant German portraitists of the Rococo. Trained at the Stockholm Academy, he was soon held in high esteem as a portraitist by the Swedish aristocracy, even before he went on a study trip to Italy and worked as Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s collaborator in Venice. He briefly attended a drawing school in Nuremberg, until in 1730 his enormous talent secured him the position of first court painter to the Bavarian prince elector Karl Albrecht. With no sufficiently skilled painter at hand, the latter had so far not been in a position to illustrate his political ambitions with representative official portraits. After the death of the last male Habsburg monarch Charles VI, he claimed the imperial crown and was eventually crowned in Frankfurt in 1742 as Charles VII. Desmarées was thus first court painter to the emperor, marking what was a grand art historical and political epoch for Bavaria in painting as Cuvilliés did in architecture. He consequently received numerous commissions from all over Europe, first of all from the residences of his patron’s brother, the Cologne prince elector Clemens August, so that many of his works can be found in European palaces. There exist many workshop variants and replicas of official portraits vis-à-vis few autograph works of a private nature, so that it is of extraordinary significance that this painting, which has been privately owned for eighty years in a row, is now back on the market.