Portrait Of A General

Jacob Carl Studer (Oberwil, 1694 - Lucerne, 1756)

Portrait of a general

Oil on canvas, cm 95 x 71

With frame, cm 105 x 82

Signed and dated in the lower right: Carl Studer Pinx: 1751

Born in 1694 in Oberwil, he was the son of the painter Franz Carl Stauder, who taught him the first rudiments of the art of painting: his training continued with a fruitful trip to Augsburg. In 1710, he received one of his first commissions, making a book of coats of arms for the monastery of Rheinau. Stauder worked mainly in the Lake Constance region and in Upper Swabia. The historical sources refer to the vastness of its production, about which we currently have limited knowledge. We are aware, however, that the artist was able to build around him, in his senior years, a particularly flourishing and well-organized workshop: among his pupils we remember Johannes Zick, Jakob Anton von Lenz and Johann Balthasar Riepp. Studer was mainly engaged in religious painting and portraiture: there are many altarpieces and frescoes of the artist in Swiss churches. Died in Lucerne at the beginning of 1756.

The figure, in armour, carries on his chest a gold medal with the coat of arms of the aristocratic Republic of Geneva, political entity born in Switzerland at the end of the '500 and particularly flourishing at economic and socio-cultural level in the XVIII century. The figure represented in arms in the portrait is certainly a high-ranking general who in the first half of the XVIII century was involved in the defense of city. Of particular technical expertise are the lenticular rendering of the many precious details of the armor and the execution of the intense landscape that opens up behind the armigero.