This intimate and elegant candlelit portrait is by the prominent German female artist Anna Dorothea Therbusch, née Liszewska.  Painted while she was in Paris, it is one of the most accomplished and moving paintings by Therbusch, whose oeuvre mostly consists of formal court portraits. 

A scientist sits in a quiet, dark interior, looking directly at the viewer. He is dressed formally, with a crisp, ruffled white shirt under a dark green jacket, though his appearance has a slightly tussled feel. He rests his head on his left hand, as if he has been awake late into the night working; indeed the candle that serves as the central source of light has burned down quite a bit. In his right hand he holds a stylus, and scattered on the table are a number of instruments relating to his work, including a microscope, a pair of scissors, some small glass lenses and a slide device. The reflection of the candle's light throughout the scene draws the viewer's eye around the composition: to the flickering reflection in his glassy eyes, the haunting shadow on the wall behind him, and the warm shadows on his right sleeve and lap, rendered with painterly effect.

Anna Dorothea first studied with her father, the Polish painter Georg Liszewski, and in 1742 she married Ernst Fredrich Therbusch. At that point her output as an artist seems to have dwindled (perhaps as the couple had five children by 1750) but her career received a new energy in 1761, when she was called to court at Stuttgart of Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg . She was then appointed court painter in Mannheim in 1763, and in 1765 moved to Paris where she would live for five years. She was reçue by the Académie royale in 1767, and her morceau de réception was another candlelit scene similar to the present work (fig. 1).¹ Stylistically similar in tone as well as subject matter, the present painting has been dated by Berckenhagen to the same moment, 1766-1768.²

Therbusch left Paris a few years later as she struggled to grow her career there and faced financial difficulties. Her t.mes in France, however, is considered her most creative and fruitful period, when she broke out of the formal mode of court portraiture that had established her career and to which she would ultimately return. Her paintings such as the present work show an understanding of many different international painters and movements, particularly the seventeenth-century Utrecht Caravaggisti as well as the more intimate candlelit scenes of Dutch artists like Godfried Schalcken. Here her warm, tenebristic tone and the scientific subject matter has parallels with the early candlelit paintings of the English painter Joseph Wright of Derby, whose paintings such as An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump date from roughly the same moment.³ After leaving Paris, Therbusch returned to Prussia where she served as court painter to Frederick the Great and also spent t.mes in Brussels, the Hague, and Vienna.

When the painting was offered in 1996, Professor Helmut Börsch-Supan confirmed the attribution. Another autograph version of the painting is at Potsdam in the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation (inv. no. GK 50859).⁴ Küster-Heise dates both versions to Therbusch's years in Paris, 1766-1770.

1. Now at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, inv. no. MRA124

2. Berckenhagen 1987.

3. Oil on canvas, 6 by 8 feet, National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG725.

4. See Küster-Heise 2008, cat. no. III-66.