Otto Bismarck

Bismarck looks out from under a broad soft hat, the kind he wore at Friedrichsruh, his estate in the forest east of Hamburg. Franz von Lenbach was a regular guest there, and the hat appears in several portraits he made of the old chancellor around 1890, the year the young emperor Wilhelm II forced his resignation. The museum gives this one no date. It is painted in oil on paperboard, a lighter and quicker support than canvas, and Lenbach signed it at the lower right. It reached Boston through the New York art dealer William Schaus, and by 1903 it belonged to Eben D. Jordan, heir to the Jordan Marsh department store, who in 1909 paid for the city's new opera house. His son Robert gave the portrait to the museum in 1924.