Von Keller’s early paintings meld the female form with the
phenomenon of the salon to produce an image of bourgeois femininity.
Created around 1871, Sad News features an elegant grande dame
of the contemporary metropolis against the setting of her salon.
Like an odalisque in one of the era’s many Orientalist images, evoking
a wealth of sensual pleasures, she lies across a sofa, a bundle of
correspondence on the lavish floral carpet next to her testimony to
happier days, filled perhaps with a lover’s vows of eternal fidelity.
A sigh is almost audible in the room: ‘Such is life’.
      From 1882 to 1883, Albert von Keller and his wife Irene lived
part-time in Paris, not far from the legendary Palais Garnier,
the Paris opera house opened in 1875. – While it was characteristic of
von Keller to include portraits in his genre paintings, it was precisely
those pieces that took on a peculiarly still-life aesthetics. In numerous
groups of works, von Keller expresses his devotion to variety. The
two portraits of Milli Beckmann, for instance, painted in Paris in 1883,
are slightly Orientalized variations on the theme of ‘lady on sofa’.
Each painting conveys its own chromatic, formal and decorative idea:
Milli Beckmann with Daughter reflects, chiefly in its palette of colours,
the situation that is transposed in Parisienne on an Ottoman into
another format, and thus transformed from realist representation to
graven image. The surface of the picture becomes an ornamental
pattern, as it were, further emphasized by von Keller’s selective use of
peinture pure under the influence of the Impressionists. A German
acquaintance of the painter’s makes of the protagonist a figure from
a fictitious French novel; the bluish-green wall becomes a fond rouge;
and the umbrella, pressed into service by von Keller’s virtuoso hand,
becomes a pink parapluie.
      A theme of von Keller’s 1891 Picture Book is vision in all of its
variety, from a mother’s loving regard to the reader’s gaze at pictures
in a book. It offers a glimpse at a scene of contentment and private
well-being, raised to the status of a common fantasy or example
by its display at public exhibitions. Its cozy contentment threatens to
become its opposite. In his Diner (1891), Albert von Keller renders
contemporary social mores palpably present.
      Von Keller’s Portrait of Alexandra Feodorovna, his 1896 likeness
of the last Czarina, may be considered a bravura marriage of tradition
and modernization, a public attempt to create a representative
masterpiece. It is surely the Czarina’s most beautiful portrait, a work
seemingly made to be used in a PR campaign for both its subject and
its painter, who thereby undoubtedly won himself an entrée to Munich’s
elegant female society.