The Painter Moritz von Schwind

In the late summer of 1833 Friedrich von Amerling was travelling home to Vienna from the Netherlands and broke his journey in Munich. There he painted Moritz von Schwind, a fellow Viennese painter who had moved to Munich five years earlier, the year his friend the composer Franz Schubert died. Amerling finished the portrait in one sitting, on 28 August, and wrote that date under his signature while the paint was still wet. You can find it just in front of the sitter's face. He called pictures like this his alla prima portraits, painted at one go and mostly of close friends and fellow artists. The coat is laid in with quick, rough strokes, and the care goes into the face. The pink cheeks were real, too. Schwind's biographer Lukas von Führich described them as a family trait.