Portrait of a Young Frau Rath

(Active in Frankfurt around 1757/58) A documented portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's mother, Katharina Elisabeth Goethe, née Textor (Frankfurt, 19 February 1731 - 13 September 1808). The painting depicts Goethe's mother in her youth - presumably she was about 26 years old when this portrait was made. The lively eyes are echoed in later portraits, accurately reflecting her self-awareness and well-known inclination for storytelling. She wears a cap over her combed-back hair, adorned with colored enamel flowers; such flowers are listed in her inventory. She wears a blue silk coat with fur trim. This coat plays a crucial role in determining the portrait's date, as her husband, Caspar Goethe, kept the famous household book "Liber Domesticus" very seriously and regularly, 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, Katharina Elisabeth must have been 26 years old at the time of her portrait. This portrait of Goethe's mother was likely commissioned by her parents, the Textors, as it was not listed in Goethe's father's household book. It may have later hung in the house on Großer Hirschgraben itself. In that case, it would have been a possible object of the original furnishings of the Goethe House. Oil on canvas, lined; 87.5 cm x 65 cm. On the reverse of the stretcher is a note: "Collection M. H. Franke Murrhardt." Minor restorations and retouching. Frame. 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, there is a photographic reproduction of this painting 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," pertains to Margarete H. Franke, wife of Richard Franke, a fur merchant from Murrhardt. The couple originally worked in the fur industry in Leipzig. Their catalog, published in 1968 regarding their art collection on the theme of fur, also includes this "portrait in a fur coat." Until that time, information about whom it concerned was lost, as the portrait of Katharina Elisabeth Goethe was considered lost for a long time and only reappeared in a southern German private collection, where it was an anonymous portrait due to the fur coat.