John Baptist LAMPI the Younger (1775-1837) - attributed, Portrait of Ferdinand Higersberger with his wife Anna, née Maslowska

oil, duplicated canvas; 175.5 x 137 cm.

The offered painting is a sizable full-page portrait of a married couple. It is an outstanding example of portrait painting on Polish soil from the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Higersberger family came to Poland from Saxony, probably with the reign of the Saxon dynasty. Over time, they settled in Kuyavia and Pomerania, where they owned considerable estates. The portrayed Ferdynand Higersberger (probably born around 1760), held one of the most important positions at the court of King Stanislaw August. In the painting he is depicted with his young wife and two children shown
as putti. The painting can also be regarded as an allegory of the marriage itself. The canvas belonged to the Higersberger family until 1947. A statement from the then owner dates from that year, thanks to which it is possible to identify the portrayed figures. It also specifies the authorship of
Lampi "residing at the court of King Stanislaw August at the time". This can be confirmed by comparing the offered painting with the "Portrait of a man writing with a goose feather" in the collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. The way the man's head is modeled, the expressive
shaping of his facial features, strongly marked eyebrow lines, soft hand modeling, leaving the background in twilight, bring to mind the portrait of Ferdinand Higersberger and his wife.
Taking into account the facts about the portrayed persons, the circumstances of the creation of the opinionated painting and the results of the stylistic analysis of the image of the man with a pen, it can be concluded,
that the author of the offered painting is John Baptist Lampi the Younger (1775-1837), and the work may have been painted around 1790, possibly under the eye of his father, the prominent portraitist John Baptist Lampi the Elder (1751-1830)