Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein

Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein spent his career painting the powerful, yet the work of his that lasts is a stack of pencil drawings. Across a long life he sketched hundreds of portraits of the writers, artists and scholars he met, keeping them as a deliberate face-by-face record of his age. Many of those sheets are now in the print collection in Dresden. A few reached the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The grand commissions were how he made his name. The son of a Saxon portrait painter who taught him first, he learned by copying old masters in the Dresden picture gallery, then ran a studio in Saint Petersburg painting Russian nobles, spent seven years in Rome among the German artists gathered there, and came home to a professorship and the post of court painter. In 1831 the king of Saxony ennobled him, and plain Carl Vogel became Vogel von Vogelstein.