Portrait of Johann Rudolf Burckhardt

Description

J.R. Burckhardt (1750-1813) was by profession a silk ribbon manufacturer and from 1777 held the influential office of director of the merchants' association. Here, however, he appears as a private citizen. The statuette of Apollo and the books as attributes in the background recall the Gedanken über den Stand eines Kaufmanns (Thoughts on a merchant's station) by his Basle contemporary Jakob Sarasin, in which the merchant, too, is expected to have an understanding of the fine arts, "... for without them what use are knowledge of languages, grace and wit in life?" Burckhardt was a friend of Gessner, Lavater, Pestalozzi and Goethe. In Basle he has left his mark as an ambitious patron of architecture: his town residence, the Haus zum Kirschgarten (built 1775-80), is a high point of early Neoclassical secular architecture in the Upper Rhine region. In this portrait, Anton Graff justifies his high reputation as a portraitist and especially as a pioneer of the naturalistic portrait.