10890

Carl Kupelwieser 1903

Head and shoulders to the left in three-quarter profile, head turned almost full-face to the viewer, wearing a jacket and tie, a white shirt just indicated  

Pencil and charcoal, heightened with white on grey Ingres paper, 49.5 x 33.4 cm (19 ½ x 13 ¼ in.)

Inscribed lower right: Herr Kupelwieser / in freundlicher / Erinnerung / 903. / László FE

Sitters’ Book I, f. 56: Dr Carl Kupelwieser 

Private Collection

This portrait drawing is one of some twenty preparatory works made in connection with the group portrait of the Kupelwieser family [10429], completed during the four years that the artist was living in Vienna, 1903-1907. It was the largest and most complex commission de László had accepted to that point in his career, and is now the earliest surviving group portrait.^[1] De László made three other formal portrait drawings of members of the family: the sitter’s wife Bertha [10391], their son Hans [5895] and their daughter Paula [10426]. It seems all four of these drawings were returned to the sitters’ families after the artist’s death.

The exact pose in the present drawing was not used in the finished picture, Herr Kupewieser being finally portrayed full face, slightly to the right, which better incorporates him in the composition. A three-quarter length unsigned oil study of the sitter [10679], another half-length study [10690] and one depicting Carl with his elder daughter Ida [10692] remained in the artist’s studio until his death but two were burnt in 1947, in accordance with de László’s wishes. The third, [10692], remains untraced.

Carl Kupelwieser was born on 30 October 1841 in Vienna, Austria, one of the ten children of Leopold Kupelwieser (1796–1862), the famous Austrian painter and friend of Schubert, and his wife Johanna Lutz (1803–1883). He was brought up in Vienna and at the lakeside town Pörtschach, in Carinthia in southern Austria. Although his principal interests lay in the natural sciences, Carl studied law at the University of Vienna and from 1866 worked as a lawyer. In 1869 he married Bertha Wittgenstein, a member of an important and wealthy Viennese family. Her brother Karl, the so-called “Iron and Steel King of Austria”, owned many of the steel plants in Austria, Hungary and Bohemia. Carl Kupelwieser joined his brother-in-law’s consortium as legal advisor and prospered financially. In 1897 the Kupelwiesers bought the Seehof, an estate at Lunz in Lower Austria, where they converted a former convent into a magnificent house. Carl and Bertha also lived in the Weihburggasse in central Vienna. They had three children: Ida (born 1870), Paula (born 1875), and Hans (born 1879).

Carl Kupelwieser was a great philanthropist and patron of several scientific and humanitarian foundations. In 1889 Bertha bought a large estate in Kyrnberg near Pyhra, where Carl also established an agricultural school, the Farming Technology College, for the sons and daughters of alpine farmers. He was the founder and benefactor of the Radium Institute in Vienna, a biological research laboratory at Lunz, a children’s sanatorium for tuberculosis in Breitenstein and a general hospital in Scheibbs. The Biological Institute in Lunz was later incorporated into the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Germany.

Carl Kupelwieser died aged 83 on 25 September 1925 at the family home in Lunz.

LITERATURE:

•Friedrichs, Margret, Lebens- und Überlebenskunst der Kupelwieser in Stekl, Hannes (ed.), Bürgerliche Familien: Lebenswege im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert, pp. 35–74, Böhlau, Vienna 2000

AG & CWS 2014