Christian Seybold

Christian Seybold painted his own face more than two dozen times, in poses, clothes and manner so alike that the pictures read as a series. They are scattered today between the princely Liechtenstein collection, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Louvre, and museums in Budapest, Lille, Nuremberg and Warsaw.

He had no formal training. Baptised in 1695 in Neuenhain, a village in the Taunus hills near Frankfurt, one of 11 children, he taught himself and settled in Vienna at a date nobody has pinned down. His speciality was the close-up head of an old man, an old woman or a child, painted in minute detail in the manner made popular by Balthasar Denner, a Hamburg painter famous for exactly such heads. That precision found royal buyers. In 1745 Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, named him court painter, and in 1749 Empress Maria Theresa made him her chamber painter in Vienna, where he died in 1768.