Zweig MS 30

Copy. In pencil. Shows Beethoven’s head turned to the left and resting on a pillow, a cover drawn up beneath his chin. With copy of Danhauser’s signature and the date 1827 diagonally to the left. Below is the faint pencil inscription ‘Beethoven / Den 28ten März an seinem / Todtenbette gezeichnet zum / Zweke einer lithographie’, and in the bottom right corner of the leaf ‘1/1’. On the verso is part of a lithograph of a rural scene, apparently no. 34 in a series, printed by Auguste Bry, Paris, and published in Paris by Francois Delarue Succ. and in London by ‘Gambart et Co. 25 Bern[ers Street]’, the last part of the address being on the portion of leaf cut away.

Danhauser was given permission two days after Beethoven’s death to take a plaster cast of his features and at the same time apparently made the drawing of which Zweig MS 30 is a copy, from which he subsequently published a lithograph. A sketch in oils by Danhauser also exists, and is reproduced as frontispiece to Brandenburg. According to Thayer an autopsy had already been carried out involving the cutting and removal of temporal bone by the time Danhauser began work. Although when received in the British Library the present drawing was pasted on a card so that the verso of the leaf could not be seen, Zweig himself was aware that the drawing was made on the verso of a cut-down part of a lithograph, and writes of it on his record card (Add. MS 73167, f. 9r); however, he can hardly have known that the partial address given for the London publishers Gambart, ‘25 Bern[ers Street]’ was one they did not occupy until 1844. Maas establishes that Ernest Gambart came to London only in 1840, at first trading with his partner Junin, and moved to Berners St. in 1844, still trading under their joint names. The conclusion has to be that Zweig MS 30 is a copy rather than the original drawing that Zweig, and others before him, took it to be. Frimmel (1923) writes that the drawing had come to light again ‘in unseren Tagen’, and he quotes the inscription as found on Zweig MS 30. However, his reproduction, captioned as the drawing, is not of Zweig MS 30: it differs in minor detail as well as in the major point that the head faces to the other direction. The reproduction in Bekker appears to be of the same original as used by Frimmel. The lithograph, as reproduced in Anderson, has similar detail to the reproduction in Frimmel, but shows the head facing the same way as in Zweig MS 30.