The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape

The Actor Maximilian Korn in a Landscape — Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. 1828.

Medium: Oil on panel. Dimensions: 31.5 × 26 cm (12 3/8 × 10 1/4 in.); Framed: 45.1 × 39.4 × 8.3 cm (17 3/4 × 15 1/2 × 3 1/4 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

This portrait’s sitter, a famous Viennese actor named Maximilian Korn, poses elegantly in fine garments with his finger holding his place in a book, as if he has just been interrupted while reading. Artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, no stranger to the theater himself, honed his skill as a painter by copying well-known works in Dresden, Rome, and Vienna while on tour with his wife, Katharina Weidner, a successful opera singer. Here, Waldmüller updated the traditional Renaissance portrait with a landscape background by integrating the sitter into his organic surroundings: Korn leans on a mossy rock and basks in the same sunlight that illuminates the distant mountains.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.