2008.266: Head of a Young Man

Identification and Creation

Object Number

2008.266

People

Thomas Brunn, Danish (Fredensborg 1742 - 1800 Copenhagen)
Previously attributed to Johann Georg Wille, German (Königsberg in Bayern, Germany 1715 - 1808 Paris, France)
Previously attributed to Pierre-Alexandre Wille, French (Paris 1748 - 1821 Paris)
Previously attributed to circle of Jacob Matthias Schmutzer, German (1733 - 1811)

Title

Head of a Young Man

Classification

Drawings

Work Type

drawing

Date

1780

Culture

Danish

Persistent Link

https://hvrd.art/o/294539

Physical Descriptions

Medium

Two distinct shades of red chalk on off-white antique laid paper

Dimensions

55.1 x 40.5 cm (21 11/16 x 15 15/16 in.)

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History

Annamaria Edelstein at Succi Ltd., London (as of 1987), sold; to Jeffrey E. Horvitz, Boston, sold; to Harvard Art Museum, 2008, inv. no. 2008.266

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Richard Norton Memorial Fund

Accession Year

2008

Object Number

2008.266

Division

European and American Art

Contact

am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu

Permissions

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Descriptions

Commentary

This dramatic portrait was once considered to be a work by either Johann Georg Wille or his son Pierre-Alexandre Wille, but recent research has revealed that it is a rare drawing by the Danish artist Thomas Brunn, who lived in Paris for several years and became a student at the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture. Despite Brunn’s failed efforts to become a history painter, he remained in Paris and worked as a scene painter for the French royal theater. This may explain the old-fashioned seventeenth-century ruffs seen in so many of his portraits.

The fact that this was once considered to be a drawing by one of the Willes is not surprising. The elder Wille was one of the two most important engravers in later eighteenth-century Paris and an avid collector. His home and studio became a meeting place for northern Europeans in the French capital. His students included the young Austrian painter Jakob Mathias Schmutzer (to whom the present sheet was also once attributed), who eventually became the founding director of the Imperial Art Academy in Vienna. The red chalk drawing style of both Brunn and Schmutzer also owes a great debt to the justifiably celebrated virtuoso technique of the French painter and draftsman Jean-Baptiste Greuze, who was, not surprisingly, a very close friend of the elder Wille and the teacher of the younger Wille. Indeed, thanks to the writings and correspondence of friends like the elder Wille and Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, Greuze enjoyed greater celebrity in northern Europe than he did in France, and both he and Wille either trained or influenced a number of northern artists and collectors during their stay in Paris.

Publication History

• Suzanne Boorsch and John Marciari, Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery, exh. cat., Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT, 2006), under cat. no. 71, pp. 210-11 (as circle of Jacob-Mathias Schmutzer)

Verification Level