Dora Stock

• 1. Introduction

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  Dora Stock was sitting with her family when a servant announced dinner for the third time, but still no one moved. At the piano sat Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, completely absorbed, unaware of the world around him. The soup grew cold. The roast burned. And Dora finally placed her hand on Mozart's shoulder and said, gently, "Mozart, we are going in to dine; do you want to eat with us?" He played on undisturbed.

  That moment, preserved in a book of youthful reminiscences published long after Dora's death, captures something essential about her life. She was not the famous name in the room. She was the one who sketched the famous names, hosted them, raised their children, and built the kind of household where genius felt at home. Yet Dora Stock was herself a working artist of considerable skill, a portraitist whose work a later reviewer described as brutally honest and deeply thoughtful. She was born in 1759 and died in 1832, and in between she drew the last known portrait of Mozart from life, befriended Goethe, Schiller, and a constellation of writers and composers, and built one of the most important cultural salons in Dresden.

  How a girl raised in fifth-floor attic rooms above a printing house became the center of that world is a story worth telling.

• 2. The Attic Above Breitkopf

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  Johann Michael Stock, a copper engraver born in 1737, took up a position in Leipzig with the Breitkopf printing and publishing firm when Dora was five years old. The family followed him a few months later. They were not wealthy. Their rooms occupied the fifth floor of a building whose lower floors housed the Breitkopf printing operations, and Dora's father worked in the front room where the window light was best, surrounded by his family.

  Dora had no formal schooling, as was common for girls of her time. A local minister taught her reading and arithmetic. Her mother taught her music on a modest piano in the home. The Breitkopf family, being wealthy, frequently invited Dora into their house, where she played alongside children receiving far more formal educations.

  At the father's workbench, Dora learned drawing and engraving. She was evidently his star pupil. She later studied with Adam Friedrich Oeser and possibly Anton Graff, both painters. When her father died in 1773, Dora was able to help keep the family solvent by continuing the workshop's relationship with Breitkopf, working alongside her older half-brother Georg Gustav.

• 3. Young Goethe, House Guest

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  Starting when Dora was six, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe became a frequent visitor to the Stock household. He was sixteen at the time, studying jurisprudence at the university, and had signed up with Dora's father for lessons in drawing and engraving. The literary giant he would become was, in those years, a teenager with a talent for disruption.

  Goethe taught Dora about theater and organized household performances in which she took parts. He also, at Christmas, induced the family dog to eat the candy Christ-child. He required Dora and her younger sister Minna to serve as lookouts whenever he had female company. And he took the father out drinking at Auerbachs Keller, a tavern later immortalized in Faust.

  Goethe gave the family his unsolicited opinion on how daughters should be raised: he advised training them in nothing but housekeeping and cooking, saying it would be best for their future husbands. Dora's father ignored the advice entirely. Goethe met Dora and Minna again as adults and maintained friendly relations with both. She never painted his portrait.

• 4. The Körner Salon

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  Dora's younger sister Minna, born on the 11th of March 1762, became engaged to a law graduate named Christian Gottfried Körner. The engagement stalled for years because Körner's father, a man of means, refused to permit his son to marry what he called a shop-keeper's girl. When Körner's father died in 1785, leaving behind a substantial inheritance, the obstacle vanished. Gottfried and Minna married on the 7th of August and moved to Dresden, where Gottfried held a junior legal position that he would eventually rise from to the rank of consistorial councillor.

  Following the honeymoon, Dora moved in. She took a small bedroom and set up her painting apparatus in the common living area. The three of them transformed the home into a meeting place of the first order. Plays and essays were read aloud; chamber music and Singspiele were performed; lectures on art were given. Guests included Johann Gottfried von Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis, and the musicians Johann Naumann, Johann Hiller, Karl Zelter, and Weber, among many others.

  Gottfried had built a small theater inside the home for family productions, which according to biographer Linda Siegel were good enough to draw professional theater people into the audience. Dora served as director, stage manager, and coach to the children.

• 5. Schiller and the Private Premieres

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  In 1784 Dora, Minna, Körner, and a young man named Ludwig Ferdinand Huber took it upon themselves to befriend the poet Friedrich Schiller. The overture was Dora's idea: an anonymous package of small gifts, with Dora contributing a miniature portrait of each of the four senders. Schiller received it during a difficult stretch in his early career, and it heartened him considerably.

  Schiller visited the group in 1785 and vacationed with them in Loschwitz, a rural village outside Dresden. He eventually lived in the Körner household for two years and remained a lifelong friend. Dora painted three portraits of him across the years of their acquaintance.

  The small theater Gottfried had built inside the home served as the venue for private premieres of several of Schiller's yet-unpublished plays. Theodor Körner, Dora's nephew, was the first person to play the part of William Tell. Dora Stock herself was the first person to play Joan of Arc, in Schiller's The Maid of Orleans.

• 6. A Portrait in Silverpoint

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  On either the 16th or the 17th of April 1789, Mozart made a social visit to the Körner home in Dresden. He was passing through the city during a concert journey he undertook in the spring of that year. Dora took the occasion to sketch his portrait in silverpoint on ivory board. The result measures 7.6 by 6.0 centimeters.

  Silverpoint was not a common medium at the time. Dora may have learned it from her father. The portrait is now widely considered to be the last image of Mozart made from life, and it has been widely reproduced in the years since.

  The portrait changed hands several times over the following century and a half. According to the German newspaper Die Welt, it passed from a Friedrich Körner to the conductor Carl Eckert, and then to Henri Hinrichsen, the owner of the C. F. Peters music publishers in Leipzig. Hinrichsen was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. His heirs gave the portrait to the Rosenthal family in gratitude for their help. When Albi Rosenthal died in 2004, his heirs sold the picture at the end of 2005 to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg for 250,000 British pounds. Because the work is very fragile, only a replica is on display; the original is kept in the museum's protective vaults.

• 7. Painter and Witness

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  Dora Stock's artistic practice was almost entirely devoted to portraiture. Linda Siegel, her biographer, describes the paintings as deeply thoughtful works, notable for their honesty and realism and not always flattering to their subjects. A reviewer of Siegel's book wrote that Stock recoiled from vanity or exaggeration, values evident in what the reviewer called her extremely competent and brutally honest portraits.

  She worked primarily in three media: pastels, oils, and silverpoint. She was also a skilled copyist who, according to Siegel, could not keep up with the demand for copies of works in the Dresden Paintings Gallery. She was a member of the Dresden Academy of Art, and her work was exhibited there five times during the years 1800-1813.

  The years 1813-1815 brought grief from multiple directions. Dresden fell into chaos during the final stages of the Napoleonic Wars. French soldiers occupied civilian homes including the Körner residence. Theodor Körner, Dora's nephew, had volunteered for the Freikorps to fight against Napoleon and died in action in 1813. His sister Emma died of a short illness two years later. The Körners were left without children. Then Gottfried fell into conflict with Frederick Augustus, the ruler of Saxony, and lost his government post.

  In 1815 Dora, Minna, and Gottfried relocated to Berlin, where Gottfried had found work as a civil servant. Dora lived out the rest of her days there and ceased to paint or draw after around 1821, due to illness. She died on the 30th of May 1832. The silverpoint portrait she made during Mozart's visit to the Körner home in 1789 remains the most widely known work she left behind.