Portrait of a Young Frau Rat

(Active in Frankfurt around 1757/58) Documented portrait of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s mother, Catharina Elisabeth Goethe, née Textor (Frankfurt, February 19, 1731 – September 13, 1808). The painting depicts Goethe’s mother in her youth—presumably she was about 26 years old when this portrait was made. Her lively eyes are repeated in later portraits—accurately reflecting her self-awareness and well-known inclination for storytelling. She wears a cap on her hair, brushed back, adorned with colorful enamel flowers; such flowers are listed among her possessions. She is dressed in a blue silk coat trimmed with fur. This coat plays a decisive role in dating the portrait, as her husband, Caspar Goethe, very seriously and regularly kept the famous household book “Liber Domesticus,” mainly in Latin, in which he recorded the purchase of a Russian-style coat with fur trim for 22 guilders in November 1757, “Mantilla pellicea Moscovita,” a winter coat with a fur hood, as shown in the painting. Consequently, Catharina Elisabeth must have been 26 years old at the time of her portrait. This portrait of Goethe’s mother was probably commissioned by her parents, the Textors, since it was not listed in Goethe’s father’s household book. It may later have hung in the house on Grosser Hirschgraben itself. In this case, it would be a possible item from the original furnishings of the Goethe House. Oil on canvas, relined; 87.5 cm x 65 cm. On the back of the stretcher there is a note: “Collection M. H. Franke Murrhardt.” Minor restorations and retouching. Framed. This painting is documented and illustrated in the biography “Frau Rat – Elisabeth Goethe, née Textor” by Johannes Heffner, Bielefeld/Leipzig, 1908 or 1912. Additionally, it is illustrated and discussed in the biography “Goethe’s Mother” by Dagmar von Gersdorff, 2003. Furthermore, a photographic reproduction of this painting exists in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. In Heffner’s biography, this “Portrait of the Young Frau Rat” is listed as “in the possession of Adolf Weigel in Leipzig.” The Leipzig publisher and antiquarian Adolf Weigel, who founded his antiquarian bookshop in 1892 and specialized in German literature and cultural history, died in 1927. The note on the back of the stretcher referring to the “Collection M. H. Franke, Murrhardt” relates to Margarete H. Franke, wife of Richard Franke, a fur trader from Murrhardt. The couple originally worked in the fur industry in Leipzig. In their catalog, published in 1968 about their art collection on the theme of fur, this “portrait in a fur coat” can also be found. Until that time, information about whom it depicted had been lost, as the portrait of Catharina Elisabeth Goethe was considered lost for a long time and only reappeared in a South German private collection, where it was regarded as an anonymous portrait due to the fur coat.