Portrait of Emil Albert Ferdynand Wedel.

Lentz painted this portrait of Emil Albert Ferdynand Wedel in 1912, near the end of his career and at a high point of his reputation as Warsaw's premier portraitist of the professional and commercial elite. Emil Wedel was heir to the chocolate confectionery dynasty E. Wedel, one of the most successful Polish consumer brands of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The family had built Warsaw's most celebrated confectionery shop and cultivated a cultured civic identity aligned with Polish national aspirations despite operating under Russian partition. Commissioning a portrait from Lentz — who had painted scholars, administrators, and cultural figures — confirmed the Wedel family's standing in Warsaw's bourgeois hierarchy. Lentz's portrait practice followed the European tradition of formal representation: the sitter posed with attributes or in settings that communicated social position while the artist pursued psychological depth through the face. By 1912 Lentz was refining a style that balanced rigorous drawing with increasingly fluid brushwork in backgrounds and costume. The portrait entered the National Museum in Warsaw and remains a document of the commercial patriciate that shaped the city's prewar cultural life.

Lentz constructs the portrait through careful tonal modelling of the face, using warm half-tones to suggest skin against a more neutrally rendered coat and background. His brushwork in the face is restrained and controlled; looser, more confident strokes handle the clothing and setting. The gaze is direct and composed, communicating confidence without stiffness.