Anton von Maron

Bio

Von Maron is one of the more interesting of the many foreign painters working in Rome in the second half of the 18th century. Trained under Karl Aigen and Daniel Gran in Vienna, he was studying in Rome by 1755, and from 1756-61 he was Mengs’ pupil and collaborator. On the latter’s moving to Madrid, Maron’s career as a portraitist began in earnest. His clients were mainly foreign visitors to Rome, and between 1767-70 as many as ten of his pictures were granted export licenses. In 1765 he married Mengs’s sister, Therése Concordia, and in the following year he was made a member of the Academia di San Luca. In that year he painted the spirited and original Robert Clive (formerly Rome, Scaretti Collection, now Galleria Nazionale) which shows him working in quite a different mode from Mengs, and in 1768 his fine portrait of Winckelmann (Weimar, Museum). After a few months in Vienna in 1772, he returned to Rome with commissions to paint the Imperial family together with a hereditary title; he had already painted Kaiser Franz I and his Family (Schönbrunn). Twice Principe of the Academia di San Luca in 1784-6, he maintained his connections with the Vienna Academy, proposing reforms based on his Roman academic experience. On Mengs’ death in 1779, he carried on the series of engravings of antique paintings at Villa Negroni begun under Mengs, but never succeeded in ousting Angelika Kauffmann as the leading portraitist in Rome. His Fourth Marchioness of Bristol of 1779 (Christie’s 30th July 1964, Lot 11), formerly attributed to Vigée-Lebrun, shows him searching for a personal manner.

Von Maron was also active as a figure painter, notably in the 1780s, when he painted the five ceiling pictures showing Dido and Aeneas in Villa Borghese (1784-5) and an altarpiece for Loreto of 1789. From 1791 dates The Sabine Woman brought to Thalassius for the new apartments at Palazzo Altieri, Rome, and from 1791-2 von Maron was in Genoa – the last major moment of his career before he lost much of his money because of the financial crisis in the Papal States and the creation of the Roman Republic. He seems to have painted almost nothing from this time until the end of his life.