Johann Friedrich August Tischbein, a pair (2)

(Maastricht 1750–1812 Heidelberg)
Portraits of Gottlieb Hufeland (1760–1817) and his wife, Wilhelmine Hufeland, née Wiedemann (1776–1823),
signed and dated lower right and lower left respectively: Tischbein/1797,
oil on canvas, each 72 x 55 cm, framed, a pair (2)

Provenance:
by descent in the sitters’ family

Gottlieb Hufeland, member of a wealthy family of senators from Gdańsk, was one of the leading lawyers of his time. He was a professor at the Universities of Jena (1788), Würzburg (1803), Landshut (1806 and 1812), and Halle (1816). He was amongst the first to use the term ‘political economics’ in his publications and lectures. From 1788 to 1799 Hufeland was a co-editor of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in Jena together with Friedrich Justin Bertuch, Christian Gottfried Schütz, and Christoph Martin Wieland. In Jena he met Friedrich Schiller, who wrote about Hufeland: ‘a quiet, contemplative spirit full of salt and profound research’. Between 1808 and 1812, Hufeland held the offices of President of the Senate and Mayor in his native town of Gdańsk.

In Deutsche Biographie one can read about Hufeland: ‘Hufeland established a remarkable academic and literary practice at four German universities. He held lectures about various aspects of Roman law, German civil law, natural justice and public law, as well as state economy and encyclopaedic thought, publishing works in each of these disciplines […]. He was a lawyer profoundly educated in philosophy, as proves his Versuch über den Grundsatz des Naturrechts (Leipzig 1785), one of the first legal texts dealing with Kant’s philosophy in an informed manner. Kant himself reviewed the work very favourably in the Jenaer Allgemeinen Literatur-Zeitung (1786, no. 92) because of “the lively, interested spirit of its author, of whom one can still expect a great deal in the future”.’