In 1830, the Munich toy shop Auracher delivered new toys to the younger children of King Ludwig I at the royal residence. However, the deliverer, the 17-year-old Helene Sedlmayr, caught the eye of the king.
Helene Sedlmayr was born in 1813 in Trostberg, Upper Bavaria, the daughter of a shoemaker. At 15, she was employed in the aforementioned toy shop in Munich, which also supplied the royal court. When Ludwig I saw Sedlmayr, he had started a project a few years earlier that is widely known to this day: the Gallery of Beauties in Munich's Nymphenburg Palace.
Ludwig I, who could rarely resist a beautiful woman, was not the first to commission such a gallery. There were similar galleries in Italy, England, Saxony and Russia. However, while those galleries of beauties had focused on ladies of the nobility, Ludwig “democratized” the portraits by including young women from all classes. In the gallery, for example, you can find portraits of a royal lady like Ludwig's sister Sophie, Archduchess of Austria, or a noble adventuress like Lady Jane Digby, as well as a commoner like Auguste Strobl, the daughter of the royal accountant.
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The executive artist of this project, which comprised 36 portraits by 1850, was the ingenious portrait painter Joseph Karl Stieler, who had been the Bavarian court painter since 1820. Stieler's beauties were absolutely flawless, but at the same time so realistic that you thought you were face to face with them. While he had portrayed the 12 beauties up to that point in clothes that corresponded to the fashion of the time, he had something else in mind for Helene Sedlmayr, who came from a humble background: the Munich costume of a dirndl. Perhaps the arrangement was also the idea of Ludwig himself, who gave Helene “a beautiful, silver latched hood, silver chains for the bodice, a scarf, [and] a dress” for her sitting.
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The result was a portrait in 1831 that shows Helene in Madonna-like innocence, with soft brown eyes looking up dreamily – the epitome of a “beautiful woman from Munich”. Ludwig was delighted. Of course, the first version went straight to the Gallery of Beauties; a second version, which Stieler painted between 1831 and 1834, was presented to the sitter herself. Perhaps it was a wedding present, as Helene married the royal valet Hermes Miller in April 1834. The happy marriage produced ten children, some of whom had godparents from the royal family, including King Ludwig I himself.
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The second portrait remained in the possession of Helene Sedlmayr's descendants until it was offered at an auction of 19th-century art at Grisebach in Berlin last week. With an estimated price of 80,000-120,000 euros, the portrait finally achieved 237,500 euros (including buyer's premium), which means a new record for Joseph Karl Stieler, as Grisebach announced on Instagram. The post also names the Edith-Haberland-Wagner Foundation as the buyer who plans to exhibit the portrait publicly in the future.
In recent years, portraits executed by Joseph Karl Stieler have repeatedly reached six-figure prices on the auction market, including Portrait of Maria Theresia v. Tettenborn (146,050 euros), Countess Sophie Kisseleff (120,650 euros) and several portraits of the Bavarian royal family. They all changed hands at the Neumeister auction house in Munich. Stieler's third version of the Portrait of Auguste Strobl, which was the first to move into the Gallery of Beauties in 1827, was sold by Lempertz in Cologne in 2019 for the price of 161,200 euros.
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