From the 1870s, Lenbach specialized in portraiture and quickly became a sought-after portraitist of the nobility in the new German Empire after the state’s founding in 1871. He achieved great fame with his portrait of the then Chancellor Otto Fürst von Bismarck (1815-1898). Lenbach made his first portrait of the Chancellor in Bad Gastein in the summer of 1878, and many more sessions were to follow - Bismarck is one of the most frequently portrayed personalities of contemporary history in Franz von Lenbach's oeuvre. Photographs of the Chancellor make up the largest part of the artist's photographic archive (for our motif cf. Gerhard Finckh (ed.), Die ganze moderne Kunst über den Haufen zu werfen. Franz von Lenbach und die Kunst heute, Cologne 2003, p. 172) and testify to the monopoly Lenbach had on Bismarck depictions, as he made countless portrait versions of the Chancellor for town halls, universities, museums and private salons. Thanks to the trusting relationship between painter and model, Lenbach succeeded in capturing Bismarck's personality and preserving it for posterity like no other: whether as statesman or in private apparel, the former chancellor's striking face with its bushy eyebrows, thick moustache and piercing eyes has become part of our collective pictorial memory. Beyond political representation, the portrait in Lenbach's effective, sensitive manner shows Bismarck, a person surrounded by myth, in all his humanity. The present pastel was painted six months after Bismarck's dismissal on March 18, 1890 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had ascended to the throne two years earlier. [KT]