Portrait of the Singer Jenny Lind (the Swedish Nightingale)

The prominent portraitist Eduard Magnus was born in Berlin, his father a wealthy trader. Magnus received an education in several fields, eventually settling on art. During Magnus’s early career as a painter, styles and sensibilities shifted as romanticism developed and neoclassicism faded among the bourgeoisie of central Europe. The painter’s oeuvre fits squarely in this context, his best-known portraiture utilizing realist conventions to evoke romantic ideals. His portrait of Swedish singer Jenny Lind, who gathered an enormous, international following after a promotional tour of the United States in partnership with P. T. Barnum, remains a prime example of his work.