Christoph Willibald Gluck

In the spring and summer of 1774, Christoph Willibald Gluck (Erasbach
near Neumarkt, Upper Palatinate, 1714 – Vienna, 1787) had scored triumphal
success in Paris with two operas in his new style, Iphigénie en Aulide and Orphée et Euridice. At the same time, Joseph Siffred Duplessis was working on a portrait of the French king Louis XVI. The painter was later granted the
privilege of living in the Louvre. His rise to success was meteoric: only in 1769 had Parisian critics finally accepted the artist into the community of recognised portraitists. At that time the acknowledged authority and publisher of the pioneering work Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Denis Diderot, expressed his astonishment that it had taken so long for the quality of Duplessis’ works to be recognised. In 1774 Gluck was the sensation of the Paris Salon, and the artist seized the opportunity of painting a portrait of the prominent guest from Vienna. The composer is seated, his upper body and face turned towards the viewer, at a spinet indicated in the foreground. But he is not looking at either the keys or the music, and his left hand hovers above the instrument. Gluck’s eyes are directed over the head of the viewer. In this, Duplessis is adopting a Christian pictorial tradition that is found in early medieval depictions of divine inspiration. This look in which the subject pauses for a moment of concentration, turning the eyes upwards, is later also found in the iconography of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Taken in by this depiction of the creative act, the viewer overlooks the fact that little is attractive about the composer’s scarred face. All of this makes the painting a unique musician’s portrait focused on the most important point, the act of composing. © Cäcilia Bischoff, Masterpieces of the Picture Gallery, Vienna 2010