Focus on this artwork and discuss the History.
In the early 1860s, sculptor Elisabet Ney kept her studio in Berlin, where she had trained under the recently deceased Christian Daniel Rauch. The critical success of her 1859 portrait bust of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had led to a commission for a portrait of King George V of Hanover; these two works won Ney a degree of celebrity in German artistic circles.: 29 In 1861 she received a commission for a portrait of the chemist Eilhard Mitscherlich, a prominent and much-decorated researcher at the Frederick William University in Berlin. Ney showed the finished plaster version of the portrait at the Paris Salon of 1861, alongside her portrait of Schopenhauer.: 30  She subsequently cut a final version of the piece in marble in 1863. The marble is now held by the Natural History Museum in Berlin, while the plaster original was installed in Mitscherlich's mausoleum in the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof after his death.
Arthur Schopenhauer Christian Daniel Rauch mausoleum Paris Salon Natural History Museum Berlin marble 1859 portrait bust George V of Hanover plaster Eilhard Mitscherlich bust Frederick William University Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof Elisabet Ney