Artwork Title: Portrait of Ferdinand Bergmüller and His Family

Portrait of Ferdinand Bergmüller and His Family, 1845

Franz Schrotzberg

"I adore family portraits, the suave and the crude. I love how they tell us so much about the individual personalities and about the group dynamic. Or they don't; how many false narratives are memorialized in these spare or crowded compositions? And how is character - false or genuine - revealed? Are we more likely to find the truth in the work of a very accomplished artist, the one whose technique is completely secure, who has the ability to capture a likeness, to accurately describe space and surfaces? Or should we put more faith in the naïve or less skilled painter, whose real struggle just to get things right, might diminish the likelihood of gross flattery or any calculated revision of the way the family members relate to each other? With old portraits we rarely know much if anything about the true story of these family relationships. But it's "story" and "relationship" that come..." (http://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.nl/2016/12/random-families-random-family-portraits.html)
Uploaded on Jul 23, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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