78 MORE POT-POURRI 



feeling shy about asking in German, I neither knew nor 

 guessed what it was or why it was there. It powerfully 

 arrested my attention a life-sized picture of a man of 

 about forty, sitting in a gray, flowing overcoat, on gray 

 stones in the gray Campagna of Rome. Afterwards I 

 was told that it was the famous picture of Goethe by 

 Johann Friedrich Tischbein. This painter lived from 

 1750 to 1812 that is to say, only a part of the life of 

 Goethe, who was born a year before Tischbein and died 

 in 1832. He, therefore, was thirty- seven when he wrote 

 in the letters from Italy, December, 1786, as follows : 

 ' Latterly I have often observed Tischbein attentively 

 regarding me ; and now it appears he has long cherished 

 the idea of painting my portrait. His design is already 

 settled and the canvas stretched. I am to be drawn the 

 size of life, enveloped in a white mantle, and sitting on 

 a fallen obelisk, viewing the ruins of the Campagna di 

 Roma, which are to fill up the background of the 

 picture. It will form a beautiful piece, only it will be 

 rather too large for our northern habitations. I indeed 

 may crawl into them, but the portrait will never be 

 able to enter their door.' 



This is the exact description of the picture as it now 

 is. Later on, in the letters in February of the following 

 year, Goethe again alludes to the picture : ' The great 

 portrait of myself which Tischbein had taken in hand 

 begins already to stand out from the canvas. The 

 painter has employed a clever statuary to make him a 

 little model in clay, which is elegantly draped with the 

 mantle. With this he is working away diligently.' The 

 last fact is curious, as it is exactly the way Meissonier 

 worked a hundred years after. I went to his studio 

 shortly after his death, and saw all his little clay models 

 of cannons, figures, horses, roads, from which all his 

 highly finished pictures were painted. The Goethe por- 



