Bach Portrait

This portrait after Elias Gottlob Haussmann is thought to be the oldest surviving picture of Bach. Artist Samuel Gottlob Kütner studied at Leipzig Academy of Drawing alongside Johann Sebastian Bach the Younger. The latter's father Carl Philipp Emanuel was probably referring to this illustration in 1774 when he promised Bach's first biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel to send him "a precise, recently completed engraving which is very similar to the portrait of my dear blessed father."