Carl Fredrik von Breda

• Breda, Carl Fredrik von : Georg Frans Thieleman, 1790, 42 x 34, oil, canvas (S 25, Sinebrychoff) (39.4 kB)

Breda had already been living in London for a couple of years when, in 1790, he painted the small elegant portrait of Doctor Thieleman. His painting technique had developed and become flexible and certain. Thielman's portrait uses only a few colours, mostly shades of brown and grey with the exception of red on the cheeks and flashes of yellow and green in the background. The strokes are free and broad, but the shape is still whole and clear. In Thieleman's portrait, Breda was developing his characteristic style of few well-chosen strokes, which was at its boldest in small, almost one-colour portrait sketches like this.

Georg Frans (Johan Fredrik ?) Thieleman (Thilemann ?) was a state antiquarian, a senior lecturer at the Turku Academy and secretary of the Royal Museum in Stockholm.

The portrait of Thieleman was one of the very first Swedish portraits Sinebrychoff bought from Bukowski. This tells us about Sinebrychoff's good judgement and taste in art already in the early stages of his art collecting career: anyone accustomed to art like that of the von Wright brothers cannot be expected to appreciate the special merits of Thieleman's portrait at once. The portrait had earlier belonged to the collection of Christian Hammer in Stockholm. In 1893, Hammer tried to auction some of his treasures in Cologne, but many pieces, apparently including this one, were left unsold.