Dora Stock
Dora (shortened from Doris or Dorothea) Stock (6 March 1759 – 30 May 1832) was a German artist of the 18th and 19th centuries who specialized in portraiture.
She was at the center of a highly cultivated household in which a great number of artists, musicians, and writers were guests; and her friends and acquaintances included some of the most eminent figures of her day, such as Goethe, Schiller and Mozart.
Stock had in 1756 married a widow five years his senior—Maria Helen Endner, née Schwabe (1733–1782)—who already had a son, Georg Gustav, by her previous marriage.
[2] Starting when Dora was six, her home was very frequently visited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who would eventually become the preeminent figure of German literature, but at the time was a 16-year-old studying jurisprudence at the university.
Goethe also required Dora and Minna to serve as lookouts whenever he entertained female company, and (to the family's concern) he took the father out drinking in Auerbachs Keller, a scene later immortalized in Faust.
[2] Goethe met the adult Dora and Minna a number of times in later years and remained on friendly terms with them.
[2] The teenage Goethe had offered advice to Dora's father about how to raise his daughters: "[train them] in nothing but the art of housekeeping, let them be good cooks, that will be best for their future husbands.
"[3] Her father however had no such intentions, and Dora assiduously learned the arts of drawing and engraving at his workbench; she was evidently his star pupil.
Following this event, which Siegel characterizes as devastating,[6] Dora made no further plans to marry and remained single for the rest of her life.
They did so on 7 August, and moved to Dresden, where Körner had earlier taken up a junior legal position (he eventually rose to a senior rank, consistorial councillor).
Following their honeymoon, Dora moved in with them, occupying a small bedroom and setting up her painting apparatus in the common living area.
[13] In 1785 he visited the group and vacationed with them in Loschwitz, a rural village outside Dresden,[14] eventually living for two years in the Körner household and remaining a lifelong friend.
Stock's biographer Linda Siegel describes and assesses these paintings in detail; in outline, she judges them as deeply thoughtful works, notable for their honesty and realism and not always flattering to their subjects.
An anonymous reviewer of Siegel's book says of Stock that she "recoiled from vanity or exaggeration, values that are evident in her extremely competent and brutally honest portraits.
In April 1789, when she produced this portrait, Dora Stock was living in Dresden with Minna and Gottfried, still imagining herself to be engaged to the distant Huber.
[23] Its further history was given by the German newspaper Die Welt: "the picture passed from the Körners to the conductor Carl Eckert;[24] later it was possessed by Henri Hinrichsen, the owner of the C. F. Peters music publishers of Leipzig.
The soup was allowed to grow cold and the roast to burn, simply so that we could continue to listen to the magic sound which the master, completely absorbed in what he was doing and unaware of the rest of the world, conjured from the instrument.
Thus we often had the rarest Mozartian musical accompaniment to our meal, Doris concluded her narrative, and when we rose from table we found him still sitting at the keyboard.
