Franz von Lenbach with his wife and daughters

Lenbach's 1903 family portrait — depicting himself with his wife Charlotte Baroness Hornstein and their daughters Gabriele and Marion — is among the most personal of his large-scale works, setting aside the official portrait mode of his professional commissions in favor of a domestic group image. Lenbach was sixty-three and near the end of his life when this was painted; he died in 1904. The portrait is now in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the museum built within his former villa that preserves the largest collection of his work and documentation of his remarkable career at the center of German cultural life. The family portrait represents an attempt to leave behind a permanent record of his own private world alongside the official portraits of his public one.

The group portrait deploys the family in an informal arrangement that nonetheless maintains the tonal authority of Lenbach's mature technique. His characteristic warm glazing and dark ground are present, but the informality of the family grouping — children, wife, the aging master himself — softens the official portrait manner into something more intimate and documentary.