Portrait Of A Man In A Red Jacket, 18th Century

A very beautiful portrait of a young man in a red jacket, seated on a gilded wooden chair upholstered in blue velvet.
Beautiful carved and gilded wooden frame.
Cleaning the gilding would enhance the painting; please contact our restorer for an estimate.
This is a work from the 18th-century German School and can be attributed to Anton GRAFF.
Dimensions of the canvas: 65.5 cm x 54.5 cm
Dimensions with frame 82 cm x 65.5 cm

Anton GRAFF
born November 18, 1736, in Winterhour and died June 22, 1813, in Dresden.
He was a Swiss portrait painter who made his career in Germany.
Sirey, in his dictionary of painters, says of Graff that he possessed great truthfulness and naturalness, a total lack of pretension, and a pleasing draftsmanship, and that he was one of the finest painters of his time. Considered one of the most important painters of his time, Graff—whose portraits were painted without props and rarely in full-length—focused his efforts on the head, with its powerful, pensive brow, of his subject.
He had a gift for seeing each of his models in their own unique light; not content merely to have them pose, he wanted to get to know them well, to share in their private lives, in order to imbue the image with the person’s true character.
His brush always displayed the same psychological insight, whether he was painting noblemen, artists, or writers.
He died at the age of 76.
Graff kept a record of all his works, just as Mme. Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun did. His ledger lists 1,655 paintings and 322 drawings; it is true that he worked for nearly half a century and continued to paint even as age had considerably weakened his eyesight.
All the princes and princesses of the House of Saxony, as well as all the notable figures in that part of Germany, posed for Graff, though this did not prevent him from copying masterpieces from the Dresden Gallery for the Empress of Russia and other art collectors.