Portrait of the Art Historian Adolph Bayersdorfer

The man here is Adolf Bayersdorfer, a German art historian and a close friend of Böcklin, painted in 1875. Bayersdorfer made his name as a connoisseur, the kind of expert trusted to decide who had really painted a disputed old picture. In 1871 he took part in a famous dispute in Dresden over two paintings both claimed as the work of Hans Holbein the Younger, an argument that pushed the whole field toward stricter, more careful methods of attribution. A few years after this portrait he became a curator at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the great Bavarian painting gallery. Away from pictures he also ran the chess column of a Munich newspaper, a sideline he kept up for years until his death in 1901.