Franz von Lenbach with His Wife and Daughters

On 12 October 1902, on his way home from a trip to Schrobenhausen, the Bavarian town where he was born, Franz von Lenbach suffered a stroke, and he never fully recovered. This family portrait is signed at the lower right F. Lenbach 1903. The museum names the sitters with him. His second wife, Lolo von Hornstein, born in 1861, had married him in 1896. Marion, born in 1892, was the daughter of his first marriage, to Countess Magdalena Moltke, and Gabriele, born in 1899, was the child of the second. Gabriele would later marry Kurt Neven DuMont, a newspaper publisher in Cologne. The portrait is painted on cardboard, almost a metre high and more than 1.2 metres wide, and the museum also keeps a full-length sketch of the Lenbach family from the same year. Lenbach died in his Munich villa in May 1904, and in 1925 Lolo gave this picture to the city from his estate.