(Bonn 1738–1818 Vienna)
Portrait of Clemens August of Bavaria, Archbishop and Elector of Cologne, wearing a dressing gown, half-length,
oil on canvas, 93.5 x 73 cm, framed

We are grateful to Helmut Börsch-Supan for identifying the sitter and for suggesting the attribution. The present painting is accompanied by his written analysis.

The identification of this interesting portrait is based on the inscription on a letter in the lower right of the painting, to which the sitter points. The letter is addressed to ‘Son altesse ser:me Electorale/ Monsigneur Le Duc Clement/ August de Bavière. Electeur de Cologne. ppp./ a Bonn’.

Surprisingly intimate and stripped of all official iconography, this rediscovered portrait is a rare depiction of the aging prince. Portraits in dressing gowns are not without precedence for members of the Wittelsbach family, as several examples demonstrate, among them Clement August’s own portrait by Joseph Vivien in Schloss Falkenslust, but also Desmarées’ portrait of Elector Max III. Joseph in a dressing gown with Count Seeau in the Munich residence, painted in 1755.

Clemens August (1700–1761) of the Bavarian house Wittelsbach superseded his uncle as Archbishop and Prince Elector of Cologne in 1723. At this point he was already Bishop of Münster and Paderborn and later attained the Bishoprics of Hildesheim and Osnabrück and the title of Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. This was an astonishing accumulation of titles. He was known by contemporaries as the Monsieur des cinq églises, after a bon mot coined by Frederick the Great of Prussia.

The present painting would appear to date to Clemens August’ final years. The physiognomy is similar to the well-known slightly static and less individualised portrait types developed by George Desmarées more than ten years earlier and used many times. Here, however, the emphasis appears to be on a more truthful and less idealised likeness, representing a much more realistic and rare depiction.

Sadly, the present painting has no traditional attribution. Helmut Börsch-Supan suggests Hubert Maurer as the author. Maurer, the son of a day labourer, owed his whole career to the elector, whom he must have met whilst working as a bricklayer in one of Clemens August many building projects. Recognising his talent, the court painter Johann Georg Winter, at that time painting the interiors of a Pavilion for the elector in Brühl near Bonn, took Maurer as apprentice. Maurer worked for the Elector and also accompanied the court to Munich in 1759, when the building projects in and near Bonn where halted due to the seven years’ war. Clemens August death prevented Maurer’s further education in Italy. However, his patron had secured him a recommendation to the court in Vienna, to which Maurer moved, and in an almost unprecedented success story rose to become a well-known society portraitist and a professor at the academy, who even painted the Empress Maria Theresia. A portrait of Prince Joseph Wenzel I. von Liechtenstein (Princely collection, oil on canvas, 56 × 46 cm) is stylistically very close to the present painting.