An Actor in Costume
  • Franz Skarbina
  • Berlin 1849 - 1910
  • An Actor in Costume
  • Watercolour and gouache on cardboard,
  • signed with brush on the lower right: F. Skarbina
  • 415 × 248 mm

As a master illustrator of the urban bourgeois life of his era in metropolises such as Berlin and Paris, Skarbina loved the theatre with its actors and grand gestures. The watercolour shown here belongs stylistically as well as thematically to a series of works on paper in the same format that also depict actors in costume.1

Of interest as well is the comparison with a photograph from 1880 depicting the artist in court dress and in an almost identical pose to that of the man shown here.

In the same year, Skarbina had moved into a new, centrally-located studio at Leipziger Platz 3 and was evidently enjoying his first success as both an acclaimed painter and a sought-after teacher.

  1. Cat. Dr. Martin Moeller - Kunsthandel:
    Deutsche und Österreichische Zeichnungen,
    Hamburg 1996, no. 28 (ill.)