110976

Study portrait

Malwida Rivalier von Meysenbug 1900

Half-length in semi-profile to the left, looking away from the viewer, wearing a white high-collared shirt and a brown chiffon veil, a brown jacket just indicated.

Oil on canvas, 75 x 56 cm (29 ½ x 20 in.)

Inscribed lower right: László f. / Roma / I. IV  1900

Sitters’ Book I, f. 45: Malwida von Meysenbug  Rom 1n April 1900

Private Collection

In the spring of 1900 Philip de László was commissioned by the Hungarian Parliament to paint the portrait of Pope Leo XIII for the Fine Arts Museum in Budapest. During his two-month stay in Rome and after having finished the portrait of the Pope [4509], the artist felt free to accept other commissions, among them one to paint the “aged poetess Malvida von Maysenburg [sic].”^[1]

This “aged poetess” can be considered one of the most fascinating women of her time. It is not known why the twenty-one-year-old artist was encouraged to visit this almost blind eighty-four-year old woman living in virtual exile in an apartment in Via della Polveriera, close to San Pietro in Vincoli and the Colosseum. Was it her fame as a revolutionary and world famous author or her reputation as a proto-suffragette? Malwida von Meysenbug, the fervent supporter of women’s rights and patron of young artists and writers, had lived in Rome since 1874. For artists and writers who came to the city, Malwida was a living monument. It was almost an obligation to visit this veteran of the 1848 revolutions, who had also been a confidante of Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, his wife Cosima, and Romain Rolland. She had many prominent friends in Rome, among them the Borghese family, Marco Minghetti and his family, Bernhard von Bülow and Franz von Lenbach, who had painted her portrait in 1885. Her close ties with the diplomatic circles of the German and the Austro-Hungarian embassies might have been the point of contact with de László.^[2] 

This portrait of Malwida focuses entirely on the face which is illuminated by an invisible source of light. The pose is very similar to that of Pope Leo XIII [6027], painted only weeks, if not days, earlier. The parallels between the radiant face and the dominating eyes are striking, even though the present portrait is more of a study-portrait than a finished painting.

Malwida Rivalier von Meysenbug was born on 28 October 1816 in Kassel, the daughter of Carl Rivalier (1779-1847), of a Huguenot family, who was raised to the nobility as Freiherr (Baron) von Meysenbug in 1825, and his wife Ernestine Hansell (1784-1861). As a girl, she was taught painting, music and literature, but did not receive the education she felt she deserved, which caused her much pain as she grew up and tried to gain independence. When her father, state minister to the Hessian Elector Wilhelm II, went into exile in 1832, Malwida, her younger sister and her mother moved to Detmold. Inspired by the texts of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, she became for the first time aware of the ‘social question’, and step by step she began to distance herself from her family’s status and conservative views. In Frankfurt, where she had lived since her father’s death, she sympathized with the democratic movement and the 1848 revolution and developed her first ideas regarding female emancipation. In 1850 Malwida decided to attend the newly founded “Hochschule für das weibliche Geschlecht” (College for the Female Sex) in Hamburg. She hoped thus to liberate herself from her family and to receive a broader and better education. Owing to pressure from conservative factions, the college was forced to close in 1852 and Malwida went to Berlin. Her contacts with leading democrats led to her house being searched and she left for England to avoid imminent arrest. In London she earned her living by giving lessons, translating and writing. She became a tutor in the house of the Russian revolutionary and writer Alexander Ivanovitch Herzen (1812-1870), also known as the father of Russian socialism and agrarian populism. Malwida became a mother-figure to his youngest daughter Olga.

She settled in London, moving mostly in democratic and republican emigré circles, mixing with Carl Schurz, Lajos Kossuth, Louis Blanc, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Her acquaintance with Richard Wagner brought her nearer to the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and his “The World as Will and Representation”, which strengthened her growing doubts about the resolvability of the social question. “I became aware”, she wrote “that existence itself is the curse”.^[3] After she had turned away from politics, she still kept her cosmopolitanism and developed a clearly articulated patriotism. The revolutionary ideas of her youth gave place to a strong idealism and the belief that the completion of the character of the individual can be achieved through art and love.  Her most important publication Memoirs of an Idealist (first published as Mémoires d’une idéaliste in 1869) supports these ideas but also calls for the emancipation of women and their equal rights in education and employment. Her literary work was highly successful and influenced women’s rights movement far into the 20th century. Malwida von Meysenbug died on 26 April 1903 in Rome, where she is buried, next to Goethe’s son, in the Protestant cemetery.^[4]       

LITERATURE:

•Häntzschel, Hiltrud, “Meysenbug, Malwida Freiin von“, in: Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 17, 1994, p. 407-409

•Schleinitz, Otto von, Künstler Monographien, no. 106, Ph A. von László, Bielefeld and Leipzig (Velhagen & Klasing), 1913, p. 61

•Rutter, Owen, Portrait of a Painter, London 1939, p. 202

•Tietz, Gunther (ed.), Malwida von Meysenbug – ein Portrait, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Wien (Ullstein), 1985

AG 2010