MULLER-URY, Adolfo (Self-Portrait, 1914)
Description:
Self-Portrait in velvet jacket holding a palette. Oil on canvas, 34.1/2″ x 28.1/4″ (87.6 cm x 71.7 cm), signed and dated upper left ‘A. Muller-Ury, 1914, New York’. The back of the canvas bears the words in paint ‘per Museo Altdorf’.
Location:
Stiftung Adolfo Muller-Ury, Hospental, Switzerland.
Bibliography:
Die Woche im Bild, Switzerland, April 12, 1942, No. 15 (reproduced).
Ringier’s Unterhaltigs-Blatt, Switzerland, May 23, 1942, No. 21 (detail reproduced) – ‘Ein Schweizer, der Papste und Könige malte,’ by Emil Luthard.
The artist is listed in many artist’s dictionaries and in Who’s Who in America, but also in the Dictionnaire Historique & Biographique de La Suisse (Neuchatel, 1930), Vol. 5, p. 42, No. 20.
This self-portrait was painted from a photograph that the artist himself took, examples of which survive amongst the papers of Jessica Dragonette in the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
Although the artist evidently intended this picture to be given to the Historisches Museum von Uri in Altdorf, Switzerland, his sister Lina preferred to keep this for the Muller-Ury Stiftung.
