Anton Raphael Mengs

Anton Raphael Mengs was a German Neoclassical painter who worked in Dresden, Germany; Rome, Italy; and Madrid, Spain. During the height of his career, in the the late 18th century, Mengs found patronage among aristocrats. Like his contemporaries, Mengs took cues from Renaissance and Baroque artists, painting highly detailed and partly idealized portraits of prominent sitters. Mengs’ blue-hued self portraits, however, display the artists’ emotional relationship with his own body. For example, the swollen forehead in Self-Portrait (1776) references an illness that interfered with his career and ultimately led to his death, in 1779.