A Lamplight Study: Herr Joachim

George Frederick Watts · 1868

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

94 × 58.6 cm (37 × 23 in.); Framed: 98.2 × 76.9 × 5.8 cm (38 5/8 × 30 1/4 × 2 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

A Lamplight Study: Herr Joachim bathes its subject in the warm, concentrated glow of artificial light, giving the portrait an intimacy rarely achieved in formal Victorian painting. George Frederick Watts was among the most admired portraitists of the nineteenth century, celebrated for his ability to penetrate surface likeness and reveal something of the inner life beneath. Working in rich, layered oils, he built up tones slowly, allowing shadow to do as much work as light — a quality especially evident here, where the lamplight sculpts the face of his sitter against a deep, undefined background. Watts considered portraiture a form of historical record, painting the great minds of his age as a civic act rather than mere commission. The subject is Joseph Joachim, the Hungarian-born violinist widely regarded as the finest of his generation, whose friendship with Johannes Brahms produced one of music's most celebrated creative partnerships. Watts painted him in 1868 at the height of Joachim's fame. This hand-painted oil reproduction faithfully recreates Watts's warm tonality and considered brushwork, so the quiet authority of the original — that sense of a brilliant mind caught in a private moment of stillness — translates fully from canvas to canvas.