Bildnis der Gattin des Edukationsrats Hadermann in Frankfurt a. M.

Dated 1810, this canvas is one of the earliest known works from Cornelius's Roman period — painted in the same year the Nazarene Brotherhood arrived at Sant'Isidoro and established their communal studio-monastery. In 1810 Cornelius was twenty-six years old, newly arrived from Frankfurt via a brief stay in Rome's German colony, and at the very beginning of the radical reorientation that Italian study would produce in his art. Works from this founding moment are historically exceptional: they document the Nazarene project at its most experimental, before success had consolidated any one approach into habit. Cornelius would go on to become perhaps the most institutionally powerful German artist of the nineteenth century — Academy director in both Düsseldorf and Munich, creator of enormous fresco cycles for royalty — but in 1810 the future was entirely open.

The earliest Roman canvas by Cornelius would show the dual influences of his Frankfurt academic training — solid, competent but conventional — and the first impact of sustained study before Raphael's originals. Technique is likely careful and somewhat stiff compared to his later confidence, but the characteristic strength of the underlying draughtsmanship is already the painting's primary energy.