Friedrich Ritter von Amerling's Portrait of an Elderly Gentleman

Video Transcript

"So Friedrich Ritter Von Amerling was another important Biedermeier artist. And as a, as other painters, he was popular especially in the cities, eighteen cities. Biedermeier began, the so called technical years of Biedermeier, the period is set between the Venice Congress in 1815 and between the revolutions in 1848. And so Amerling was specialized especially in portrait painting and he made a lot of painting about the Venice court and the aristocracy who were living in Vienna at that time. He was always interested in a kind of, to make an atmosphere and also the very details of the painting. So we can recognized on his paintings that the miniature paintings were kind of, how to say, influence on Biedermeier portrait painting. So the portrait of an Elderly Gentlemen is also like this and what we can see on the painting that he wanted to make a kind of impersonal, a biblical approaching to the old man, not as to the other portraits, where we know the personality who was painted. What is really nice about that the shadows were really made soft as I mentioned the brownish above the surface of the colors of the painting, that's the seeing while he was popular among the noble, the nobelties in Vienna, that he could make portrait so intimate although he didn't mention the person who he used as a model to this painting."