Portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach

The Portraits of Johann Sebastian Bach are various paintings in which the Baroque German composer and organist Johann Sebastian Bach is portrayed. The Bach portrait painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann is the best known of all and different copies of it were made over the years. Other paintings have also been discovered often with debate regarding their authenticity. Portraits clearly identified as Bach Elias Gottlob Haussmann In 1747, Bach was admitted as the fourteenth member of the () of Lorenz Christoph Mizler, an association for musical studies founded in 1738. Under the society’s rules, each member had to donate a portrait of himself to the society’s headquarters. It would serve as a model for the engravings that, together with the various biographies of the members, would appear in the Musicalische Bibliothek (Musical library), the official magazine of the association. Upon joining, Bach handed in his own portrait made in 1746 by Elias Gottlob Haussmann. In it, Bach holds the triple six-voice canon BWV 1076. The company, in fact, required candidates to submit a scientific-mathematical work as proof of their erudition. According to an oral tradition, after the dissolution of th