Anton Einsle

In the spring of 1835 the Hungarian poet Ferenc Kölcsey, who wrote the words of Hungary's national anthem, sat for a portrait in Pest. The painter was Anton Einsle, a Viennese then working as court painter to Archduke Joseph, the Habsburg palatine who governed Hungary for the emperor. That portrait, now in the art collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, has been reproduced in Hungarian schoolbooks for generations.

Einsle was the son of a surgical instrument maker. He entered the Vienna Academy at 13 and was winning prizes by 16. He took his first portrait commissions around 1827 and moved to Prague, where he painted the Mother and Child now in the Belvedere, and in the early 1830s on to Pest.

In 1838 he returned to Vienna as a court painter, with a studio in the Hofburg, the imperial palace. Aristocrats, bishops and the city's wealthy families sat to him for careful, lifelike likenesses in a restrained manner, learned partly from two Viennese portraitists, the miniaturist Moritz Daffinger and Friedrich von Amerling. Between 1848 and 1850 he painted the young Emperor Franz Joseph many times, and he also portrayed the Empress Elisabeth. His own self-portrait belongs to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.