Portrait of Counsellor Carl Friedrich Drollinger

The counsellor in this portrait guarded a secret. Carl Friedrich Drollinger looked after the private archive of the Margrave of Baden-Durlach, which had been carried across the Rhine to neutral Basel for safekeeping in years when French armies were fighting in the Rhine valley. Drollinger took charge of it in 1711 and stayed in Basel for the rest of his life. Huber painted him in 1738, the year the ageing artist finally settled back in his native city, when the sitter was about 50 and near the end of a long career as archivist and court official. What the portrait does not show is the thing he is now remembered for. In his own hours Drollinger wrote verse in German, and after his death in 1742 he was counted among the first Swiss poets in that language to reach a wider readership.