5847

UNTRACED

Study portrait

Joseph Joachim  1903

Head and shoulders to the left, full face, wearing a brown coat and waistcoat, white shirt and black tie and gold spectacles, all against a brown background

Oil on canvas, [dimensions unknown]

Inscribed lower right: László F.E. / 1903 

Sitters’ Book I, f. 66: Joseph Joachim / 13th December 1903

Joseph Joachim, violinist, composer, conductor and teacher, was born on 28 June 1831, on an estate of the Esterházy family at Kittsee near Pressburg (then Hungary, now Bratislava, Slovakia), the seventh of eight children^[1] of the Jewish wool merchant Julius Joachim and his wife Fanny, née Figdor^[2] (1791-1867). In 1833 the family moved to Pest where he became a pupil of Stanislaw Serwaczyński, the leader of the Pest opera orchestra, and was already performing in public at the age of seven.  Soon afterwards he went to Vienna to live with his cousin Fanny (née Figdor) and her husband Hermann Christian Wittgenstein,^[3] who brought him up with their eleven children.  In Vienna he studied under Georg Hellmesberger and Joseph Böhm at the Conservatorium.  In 1843 he moved to Leipzig where he met Mendelssohn, a family friend of the Wittgensteins, who took over the personal supervision of his studies and became his devoted mentor. In August that year he shared a concert programme with Clara Schumann, which marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with her and her husband, Robert.

In 1844 Mendelssohn took the thirteen-year-old Joachim to London where, under Mendelssohn’s direction, he played the Beethoven concerto to tremendous acclaim. From then on, Joachim would become indissolubly linked to that work (he performed it more than any other concerto) and later would declare that he considered London his second home.

Following Mendelssohn’s death in 1847 he decided to study with Liszt in Weimar, and although he dedicated his first violin concerto (c.1855) to him, he later came to abhor Liszt’s musical style. In 1853 he moved to Hanover to take up the post of Konzertmeister of the Court Orchestra. It was during this time that he was baptized as a Lutheran and got to know the young Johannes Brahms, then struggling as an accompanist. Joachim soon introduced Brahms to Schumann, who was then writing his violin concerto for Joachim;^[4] a meeting which would be crucial for Brahms’s development as a composer. Indeed the creative interplay emanating from the friendship between the Schumanns, Brahms and Joachim would provide a significant contribution to the development of the German Romantic Style in music. Joachim was to champion Brahms’s music throughout Europe, especially in England, as he did Mendelssohn’s. Joachim dedicated his own Concerto in the Hungarian Manner (1861) to Brahms, who in turn wrote his violin concerto (1879) for Joachim.

In 1863 Joachim married the contralto Amalie Weiss (Schneeweiss, 1839-1899) with whom he had six children, Hermann, Johannes, Marie, Josepha, Paul and Elisabeth. In 1868 he and his wife moved to Berlin where he took up the post of director of the newly founded Hochschule für ausübende Tonkunst. Joachim obliged his wife to give up her successful career in 1878 but his own long absences abroad led to tensions in the marriage and, despite protestations from Brahms which caused a two year rift in the two men’s friendship, Joachim and his wife were divorced in 1884.

Joachim performed regularly in Vienna and from the evidence of de László’s sitters’ book it would appear they met there on 12 December 1900, while de László was painting Joachim’s cousin Josephine Oser, née Wittgenstein^[5] [11810]. De László claimed he and his wife, herself a talented amateur violinist, attended “all his famous quartette concerts”^[6] in Vienna and indeed de László acknowledged Joachim’s indirect role in his meeting his future wife in Munich in 1892: when he asked her why she was so pleased to meet a Hungarian, she replied that she loved the Hungarians and admired Joachim^[7]. In Vienna they met him often with the Osers and Joachim, a great socialite, was a frequent visitor at the de Lászlós’ home.

In his memoirs de László wrote: “I painted [Joachim] twice, and kept one of the portraits for myself.  He had the head of a patriarch, and was always calm and dignified...^[8]” The second portrait remained unfinished in the possession of the artist on his death, and was later sold by one of his descendants [5850]. According to Schleinitz (op.cit.) the present portrait was painted at a single sitting in 1903 and “the Master [de László] nevertheless considers it to be one of his best works. Mrs de László takes a particularly lively interest in this work, as she herself is an excellent virtuoso violinist. The painting is in the possession of Joachim’s son.” Joachim’s popularity meant that a published coloured photogravure of de László’s portrait was in great demand to adorn the music rooms of the violinist’s admirers. In a letter dated 3 April 1904, Fela von Kuh^[9] and her husband^[10] thank de László for the “Joachim pictures.” implying that de László had given them more than one copy. Another was presented by the artist in 1906 to Johann Blaschczik^[11], the brother-in-law of Karl Wittgenstein’s partner Vilmos Kestranek [111270]. A further copy remains in the collection of one of the descendants of the artist’s wife, while another is in the collection of the Albertina in Vienna. Joachim was also painted by John Singer Sargent in 1904;^[12] a portrait paid for by public subscription and presented to Joachim on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of his first performance in London.

Joachim died in Berlin on 15 August 1907.

EXHIBITED:        

•Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, Berlin, 1904, n° 646

LITERATURE:        

•Térey, Dr. Gabriel von, “A Hungarian Portrait Painter: Philip de László,” The Studio, Vol. 40, No. 170, 1907, pp. 254-67, ill. p. 254

•Schleinitz, Otto (von), Künstler Monographien, n° 106, Ph A. von László, Bielefeld and Leipzig (Velhagen & Klasing), 1913, ill. p. 48, pl. 55

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London, 1939, p. 221

•Hart-Davis, Duff, in collaboration with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, De László: His Life and Art, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 87

•Field, Katherine ed., Transcribed by Susan de Laszlo, The Diaries of Lucy de László Volume I: (1890-1913), de Laszlo Archive Trust, 2019, pp. 31, 231

•Field, Katherine ed., Gábor Bellák and Beáta Somfalvi, Philip de László (1869-1937); "I am an Artist of the World", Magyar Nemzeti Galéria, 2019, p. 62

•DLA071-0048, letter from Heinrich von Kuh to de László, 3 April 1904

•DLA002-0061, letter from Johann Blaschczik to de László, 21 December 1906

•DLA140-0212, Térey, Dr. Gabriel von, “A Hungarian Portrait Painter: Philip de László,” The Studio, vol. 40, no. 170, May 1907, pp. 254-67

CWS 2008