Josef Danhauser

In March 1827, hours after Ludwig van Beethoven died in Vienna, a 21-year-old painter was let into the room to press plaster over the composer's face and take his death mask. That painter was Josef Danhauser, and Beethoven would keep a grip on his imagination for the rest of his short life.

Danhauser had grown up in the family furniture works, a well-known Viennese firm, and for years he ran it with his brothers, designing chairs and cabinets in the clean Biedermeier style before painting won out. His best-known canvas, from 1840, is Liszt at the Piano: the pianist Franz Liszt plays for a room of Romantic-era stars — the writers Victor Hugo and George Sand, the violinist Paganini, the composer Rossini — while a bust of Beethoven looks down from the instrument. They were never actually in one room together. Danhauser gathered them as a kind of imagined group portrait of Romanticism.

He became a professor at the Vienna Academy in 1841 and died four years later, in 1845, at 39, of typhus.