In this richly illustrated volume, Annette Richards explores the remarkable portrait collection of C. P. E. Bach: one of the most significant collections of the eighteenth century, and certainly among the most important from the perspective of music history. By the time of his death in 1788 and the subsequent dispersal of his collection, Bach had amassed almost four hundred paintings, prints and other largely music-related objects. Richards's book can be seen as both the culmination and collation of her research over previous decades, drawing on her extensive knowledge behind the monumental achievement of her volumes on Bach's portraits in the Complete Works of C. P. E. Bach (published in 2012 and reviewed in this journal (Eighteenth-Century Music 11/1 (2014), 123–125)).
By the end of his life, Bach had accumulated a collection distinguished by both its size and its quality. His collection was well known even in its day, in large part owing to the attention it drew from Charles Burney's widely distributed account of visiting Bach in 1772. Centred on the Bach family itself, the collection included a ‘who's who’ in the musical, literary and cultural life of the composer's time. As Richards notes early in her book, even in an era of avid – even obsessive – portrait collecting, Bach's collection was ‘unprecedented’, especially in its quality and focus on musical figures.
The seven chapters are mixed in their focus and ambition: at times attending to often straightforward matters of portrait-collecting culture and relevant aspects of the Bach family history, but then delving more speculatively into the relationship between personal biography and the ‘portraitive mode’ of Bach's music itself. While much of her book is based upon previously published articles and chapters (noted briefly in the Acknowledgments towards the end of the volume), Richards provides an excellent Introduction and opening chapter that frame what follows, grounding us in the logic behind, and motivation for, Bach's collecting and displaying.
The first, and most substantial, chapter, ‘Exhibiting: The Bach Gallery and the Art of Self-Fashioning’, provides the foundation for the book in many ways, as it takes the reader through a ‘gallery tour’ of the reconstructed collection by introducing us to, and immersing us in, core aspects of the various interrelated acts of collecting, classifying and viewing the collection itself. This chapter is thus an invitation to imagine what Bach's motivations were in guiding his ‘passions, priorities, and sense of oneself’ (21). Crucial here is Bach's own inventory of the collection – completed just before his death – which provides not only basic details about the portrait (sitter, artist, format, medium), but also snippets of biographical information and an overall classification of the sitter's profession. As Richards stresses, these classifications (Kapellmeister and music directors, composers, organists and so forth) are hierarchical, and she argues that when combined with Bach's notes they provide insights into his rationale and motivation for obtaining the pictures (albeit often not in a straightforward way). Bach's sense of his own lineage through his father is evident in the many portraits of Kapellmeister and music directors that formed, in Richards's apt words, ‘the dense heart of the collection’ (28).
In the following, much shorter, chapter, ‘Collecting: C. P. E. Bach and Portrait Mania’, by referring to contemporary guides and Bach's correspondence with friends and fellow collectors, Richards offers compelling evidence of Bach's highly cultivated and assiduously applied taste, showing him to be very much a connoisseur rather than a hobbyist. Based on previously published material, this chapter shows some of the disjointed flow that occasionally arises throughout the book, as matters attended to in one chapter can make later passages somewhat redundant. Here, for example, Richards defends Bach's collecting choices, a topic that has in large part already been addressed.
As its title suggests, in chapter 3, ‘Speculating: Likeness, Resemblance, and Error’, the author adopts a more ambitious mode as she attempts to link the speculative acts of ‘reading a portrait’ to ‘listening for likeness’ in music. She opens by considering portraits of Bach's family in the collection, especially his esteemed father, and what she argues is Emanuel's complicated relationship and engagement with his father's musical legacy. She continues by drawing parallels between wrongly ascribed attributions in Bach's portrait collection, in order to explore the idea of a connoisseur's eyes and ears being engaged in ‘speculative judgement and imaginative research’ and how ‘the impulse to establish likeness brings portraits into dialogue with one another, as happens with musical pieces too’ (138–139).
Chapter 4, ‘Character: Faces, Physiognomy, and Time’, brings us to the well-trodden subject of the ‘legible face’ in an era dominated by Johann Casper Lavater's four-volume Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe (Essays on Physiognomy, for the Promotion of Knowledge and the Love of Mankind); Bach himself appeared in its third volume ((Leipzig and Winterthur: Weidmanns Erben und Reich; Heinrich Steiner und Compagnie, 1777), 200–201). Richards brings additional perspectives to the topic and continues in her more speculative mode by focusing on the intersections between temporality, the ebb and flow of feeling and the portrait (musical and image). From the Lavaterian perspective, a given portrait necessarily represents a person fixed in a moment in time and yet attempts to capture the deeper qualities of a sitter. Richards considers eighteenth-century writings on the temporal art of music and discusses some paintings that exemplify fleeting moments (such as the genre paintings by Jean Siméon Chardin), before looking at some of Bach's character pieces that paint musical portraits. Quite where we arrive at through these speculations is unclear, as the author ends by reasserting the underlying contrast between the visual portrait that ‘freezes the face’ against the musical portrait that shows ‘the shifting emotions of the individual through time’ (177).
An insight into Bach's more intimate relationships is the focus of the following chapter, ‘Friendships: Portrait Drawings and the Trace of Modern Life’. The appeal of drawings for collectors like Bach forms the basis of this chapter, and Richards delves into Bach's growing interest later in his life in collecting this more intimate medium. The portrait drawing especially served as an object for affectionate contemplation of an absent friend, and when developed into a collection could create a ‘friendship temple’. As Richards aptly describes, with Bach's circle of friends, such as the Abel family, ‘portraiture could fix and immortalize for the future, but it could also capture the living present’ and the ‘ties of friendship and collegiality’ (199).
We move easily from the portrait as an object of intimate contemplation and friendship to chapter 6: ‘Feeling: Objects of Sensibility and the “Portrait of Myself”’. Richards again links Bach's music to his portrait collection, applying contemporary notions of feeling and sensibility as ‘the central knot that ties together portrait culture and music’ in Bach's circle (208). The chapter focuses on the aesthetics of sensibility evident in the genre-bending later keyboard music found in the Kenner und Liebhaber series, especially the rondos. Linking the parallel fields of musical composition, its performance and the deeply personal contemplation of portraits (including of Bach's son J. S. the Younger, who died in 1778), Richards writes that ‘with a portrait or a rondo one can hold absent friends or a departed son, keeping them close for a moment, regarding them in the shifting light of memory or grief’ (225).
The final chapter fittingly moves to a grander scale, as it addresses ‘Memorialization: Portraits and the Invention of Music History’. Here the author considers the significance of Bach's collection to music historiography, and how Bach – as a portrait collector – both represented and was an active agent in the formation of the ‘invention of music history’. Drawing synergies between the functions of biographical anecdotes and portraits, she argues that the latter ‘interrupts chronological narrative with individual life, personal achievement, the complex and unpredictable vortex of character’ (254). Thus portraits, and portrait collecting, form part of the perceptions of, and links between, biography, art, likeness and viewing. (Again, as it is based on previously published material, there are some clunky passages in this chapter, as we are reminded unnecessarily of the popularity of portrait collecting in the 1780s.)
Richards concludes by pointing out the similar fates of Bach's portrait collection and his music because of the same shift in concern amongst both historians and portrait collectors, including their perceived ‘absorption in the moment’ (266). ‘Reclaiming the aesthetic of the portrait and anecdote’, she writes, ‘can lure us back into the late eighteenth-century music room’ (266). To this end, her book is a concerted attempt to lead us as readers to a rediscovery – or at least reappreciation – of C. P. E Bach's music and his times, and it resonates most strongly when it invites us, as viewers and listeners, to immerse ourselves in Bach's remarkable portrait collection.
