A photograph of the sitter.
Johann Friedrich Frölicher was born on March 7, 1822 and died on March 15, 1907. He was the father-in-law of ex-Federal Counsellor Hammer, who came from Solothurn, where, according to the Appenzeller Zeitung, Herisau, on May 28, 1888, Muller-Ury was about to begin painting his portrait and that of his wife. Der Bund, May 14, 1892, identifies the portraits as ‘ein Herr und eine Frau F.’, but the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, June 3, 1892, specifically describes the works as ‘die Schwieger-eltern des Herrn Alt-Bundesraths Hammer, das Ehepaar Fröhlicher [sic] aus Solothurn, darstellen’. Hammer had married the sitter’s daughter Anna Frölicher (1859-1910) in 1884 as his second wife.
