1824 Portrait by Stefan Dekker

[Jeremy Keller]

I have a German biography of the Master containing a portrait (possibly an engraving) done in 1824 by Stefan Dekker.

I note that portraits of the Tondichter tend to range from the nondescript to the sentimental. The Dekker portrait is certainly on the romantic side, but IMHO, it captures better than most our man's essential heroism and spiritual purity: It is the face of one who has led captivity captive and who has known the last wonder before the grave.

I would be interested in any communal knowledge of Dekker, and of where the portrait might be found. My ultimate objective would be to obtain a copy.

With thanks,

JK

[Andrea]

There is a copy of this portrait on this website: http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Portraits...yDrawings.html

Stefan Decker's portrait is number 13.

In all of the Beethoven books that I have this is the only mention of Stefan Decker that I could find. It comes from the book "Beethoven" by H.C.Robbins Landon:
"Beethoven, a few days after the first performance of the Ninth Symphony, is shown to us in the idealistic chalk drawing by Stephan Decker (May 1824), of which a lithograph was published in the Wiener Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung on 5 June 1824 (wherein Decker's drawing is also mentioned as having been made a few days after the famous concert). Beethoven looks grey and rather forbidding, but the master obviously approved of the lithograph because he occasionally presented one with a personal inscription. On 4 Sept. 1825, when the composer was taking the cure at Baden, he dedicated a Decker lithograph to the publisher Moritz Adolf Schlesinger. As far as can now be determined, Decker's is the last portrait of Beethoven before the composer lay on his deathbed."