Joseph Willibrord Mähler

Ludwig van Beethoven changed lodgings in Vienna again and again, and one painting went with him every time. It was a portrait by Joseph Willibrord Mähler, painted around 1804 or 1805, showing the young composer in an idealised Arcadian landscape with a lyre-guitar in his hand. Beethoven kept it until his death. It is the only authentic portrait that shows him at three-quarter length, and today it belongs to the Wien Museum.

Mähler came from Ehrenbreitstein, across the Rhine from Koblenz. He trained in Dresden with the portrait painter Anton Graff and then at the Vienna Academy, but painting stayed his second occupation. By profession he was an official of the imperial secret cabinet chancellery in Vienna. He met Beethoven in the winter of 1803 to 1804 through Stephan von Breuning, the composer's school friend from Bonn. Around 1815 Mähler painted Beethoven again, this time half-length, as part of a series of composers working in Vienna, and his likenesses of the court composer Antonio Salieri and the pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel date from the same years.