This delicate but carefully worked graphite drawing portrays an unknown man in the guise of Jesus Christ as he was described in the legendary Lentulus Letter.(1) A product of monastic culture around 1300, the letter’s vivid description inspired many northern artists including Albrecht Dürer in his conception of Christ. The letter tells of Christ’s almond shaped eyes, wide forehead, thick full beard, and hair parted in the center flowing down in curls to his shoulders in the manner known as Nazarene.(2) This manner inspired a group of German artists working in the early nineteenth century in Rome to call themselves the Nazarenes and ape Christ’s appearance. Variations of this can be seen in portraits of Friedrich Overbeck, Carl Philipp Fohr and Theodor Rehbenitz.(3)
Born in the Jewish ghetto of Hanau outside of Frankfurt, Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882) benefited from the liberalization of German culture brought about by the French occupation under Napoleon. He was able to attend the Hanau Academy of Drawing and to travel extensively as a journeyman to Munich, Paris, Florence, Naples, and Rome. Even though Oppenheim arrived in Rome shortly after the Nazarenes disbanded, there was still a large and active community of German Romantics. He was greatly influenced by their style of describing figures with strong graphic outlines and an absence of internal structuring or cross-hatching.(4) He was also very interested in their philosophy regarding a brotherhood of artists.
The Crocker drawing is very similar to another by Oppenheim of a fellow artist he met in Rome, Friedrich Müller, of 1822–23.(5) Unlike the Portrait of a Man with Open Collar, Müller’s is found in one of several sketchbooks Oppenheim used almost as a diary during his stay in Italy and contains an inscription that tells the name of the sitter, which is typical of his sketchbook. Although there are differences in scale and detail between this drawing and the Müller portrait, one can assume the Crocker drawing was created during the same period. The two portray similarly styled men sketched from life, and expand on the concept of Kunstlerfreundschaftsbild (artist’s friendship images) developed a decade earlier by Overbeck and Fohr.
In 1831, Karl Wilhelm Justi published a description of Oppenheim, presumably written by his first teacher, then the director of the Hanau Academy, Conrad Westermayr. He remarks that from the beginning of his career Oppenheim made powerful and beautiful life drawings and had a great interest in portraiture.(6) It was for his talents in the latter genre that Oppenheim was celebrated both by his colleagues and the critics; and, as a result of his reputation, Oppenheim eventually became portraitist to the world-renowned Rothschild family. Unlike his more formal painted portraits, Portrait of a Man with Open Collar displays a naturalism and intimacy apparent in his early portrait drawings. Similar to his first Self-Portrait of c. 1819, the Crocker drawing shows the unknown man abstracted from his surroundings with the focus on his physiognomy and psyche.(7)
Freyda Spira, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010
Notes:
(1) For a discussion of the Lentulus Letter, see Joseph Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture, Chicago, 1993, pp. 103–104. For all full discussion of the origins, editions, and reception of this text, see Ernst von Dobschütz, Christus-bilder. Untersuchung zur christlichen Legende, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1899.
(2) Translation taken from Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 57.
(3) Overbeck portrait by Friedrich Olivier, now in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden; Rehbenitz’s Self-Portrait now in the same collection; Fohr’s Self-Portrait now in the Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg.
(4) This style of execution is evident in many of Oppenheim’s drawings from the 1820s. Some interesting examples include: The Nude Man, ca. 1822 (Museum Hanau, Schloß Philippsruhe); After the Fall, 1822–24 (Israel Museum, Jerusalem); and Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh (Israel Museum, Jerusalem).
(5) Israel Museum, Jerusalem, inv. nr. 1882-23.
(6) Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk, eds., Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: die Entdeckung des jüdischen Selbstbewusstseins in der Kunst, Cologne, 1999, 16. For Justi see: Grundlage zu einer Hessischen Gelehrten-, Schriftsteller und Künstler-Geschichte vom Jahre 1806 biz zum Jahre 1830 , Marburg, 1831.
(7) Israel Museum, Jerusalem, inv. no. P541-8-58.
Inscriptions: verso, graphite: 22./ 8/ 22./ 26.4/ 9.6
Marks: on fragment of old mat: Nachlass/ Moritz Oppenheim (not in Lugt)
Provenance: Victor D. Sparks, New York, before 1973; Crocker Art Museum purchase
Literature: William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010; no. 55; Thomas daCosta Kaufmann, Central European Drawings in the Collection of the Crocker Art Museum, Turnhout, 2004, p. 230
