OCTOBER 77 



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 draperied 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- 

 trait has a distinct dash of affectation in it, and the whole 

 pose, excusable enough in Goethe, is of a man in the 

 prime of his life who felt himself to be famous and knew 

 himself to be handsome. To our ideas the picture is 

 singularly devoid of colour, almost monochrome ; but it 

 strikes one as very modern in treatment, considering its 

 date, and for every reason it must always remain one of 

 the interesting portraits of the world. In the early part 

 of this century and during the Napoleonic days, when the 

 Eothschilds of Frankfort began to spread themselves 

 through Europe and establish their banking-houses in so 

 many capitals, the son who went to Naples bought this 

 great canvas of Tischbein's. In this way it has ulti- 

 mately found a most fitting home not in the small house 

 which, Goethe truly said, would not admit it, but on the 

 walls of this museum in his native town. 



The Staedel Institute has many artistically interesting 

 pictures most instructive to the student of the old masters, 



