Leo Lehmann (1851): Art, History and Details

Leo Lehmann (1851) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Rudolf Lehmann (German, 1819–1905).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This portrait portrays the artist's father, himself a painter and printmaker who gave his son his earliest artistic training. Fittingly, Lehmann depicted his father at work, surrounded by the tools of his trade. Resting his arms upon a sheet of paper supported by a book and a portfolio, Leo Lehmann holds a portecrayon, a penlike holder for the 19th-century equivalent of modern wax crayons. His intense gaze and his poised drawing implement suggest that he may be recording the likeness of his son, who at the same time paints his father's portrait. Lehmann was a successful portrait painter, especially among the English aristocracy, during the latter half of the 19th century. His popularity resulted not only from his remarkable ability to reproduce the appearance of surfaces—like his father's velvet coat—but also his capacity to capture the psychological presence of his sitters.

Object facts

• Title: Leo Lehmann
• Date: 1851
• Creator attribution: Rudolf Lehmann (German, 1819–1905)
• Culture: Germany, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on fabric
• Dimensions: Unframed: 67.5 x 55.5 cm (26 9/16 x 21 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1980.268

Collection credit

Bequest of Noah L. Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1980.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 68, no. 6 (June 1981): 163–219.
• Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.