Johann Rudolf Huber

In Basel around 1700, if you were a magistrate, a merchant, or a visiting prince, the man you sat for was almost certainly Johann Rudolf Huber. He had trained young, first with a local portraitist and then in Bern under Joseph Werner, a Swiss painter who had worked at the courts of Paris and Vienna and brought that polish home.

Huber turned that training into something close to an industry. From 1683 he kept a register of every finished portrait, the Register der Contrafeit, and by the time he closed it decades later the total ran into the thousands. He later claimed more than 5,000 heads. His sitters included Joseph I, the Holy Roman Emperor, the margrave Charles William of Baden-Durlach, and the young Albrecht von Haller, who would grow into one of Europe's great naturalists.

Working across Basel, Bern, and the German courts, Huber became the portraitist of choice for the Swiss ruling class in the Baroque decades. The ledger he kept, patron after patron, is now one of the best surviving records of who sat for a portrait in that world, and when.