Henriette Feuerbach, die Stiefmutter des Künstlers

Feuerbach's 1871 portrait of his stepmother Henriette Feuerbach, held at the Belvedere in Vienna, depicts one of the most significant relationships of his life and career. Henriette Feuerbach (1812-1892) was his father's second wife and became a devoted supporter, correspondent, and posthumous champion of the painter's work. After Feuerbach's death in 1880, Henriette edited and published his letters and memoirs, presenting him to the German public as a misunderstood genius unfairly neglected by his contemporaries — a view that substantially shaped his posthumous reputation. The portrait of 1871, painted when Feuerbach was forty years old and Henriette fifty-nine, documents their relationship at a late stage of his career, when he had achieved his Vienna Academy professorship but was beginning to experience the repeated rejections and disappointments that would mark his final decade.

The portrait of an older female subject required Feuerbach to render the specific qualities of aged skin and the dignity appropriate to a woman of intellectual authority. His characteristic warm amber tonality serves this subject well — the warmth is maternal and enveloping rather than the sensuous.