Portrait of Minister of State Baron Wilhelm von Edelsheim

From 1746 until 1751, Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) was also court painter in Dresden. In 1766, the artist became "First Court Painter of the King of Spain", whose palaces in Madrid and Aranjuez he decorated with ceiling paintings and altarpieces - in competition with his contemporary, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. In his time, Mengs was considered to be one of the most significant and influential painters in Europe. He was a reformer, whose aesthetic deliberations, published in 1762 as "Thoughts on Beauty and Taste", made him the most important theoretician of Neoclassicism. At the age of twelve, compelled by his father, he had already made drawings of the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican in Rome. He later became a close friend of Johann Joachim Winkelmann.

His "Portrait of Minister of State Baron Wilhelm von Edelsheim" is a significant example of his portraiture which achieved the subtlety and rank of Joshua Reynolds, or of Anton Graff (1736-1813), whose portrait of the Baron Friedrich Gottlob Benno von Heynitz, among others, also belongs to the Kunsthalle collection. Mengs shows von Edelsheim, a Minister of State from Baden, who counted Goethe and Lavater among his friends, in a rather private image. In a painting marked by freshness and sophisticated technique, he is portrayed as an open and likably unpretentious aristocrat.