Is that the real  Beethoven? After all, he lived in the days before flash photography, and portrait painters could stretch the truth a little, and they often did, if their subject was rich, and ugly.

The truth is a bit complicated, as usual, but it should be noted that well before he died in March of 1827 Beethoven had achieved celebrity status.  People were selling his portrait all over Europe.

Ah, yes...then as now people wanted to be able to see their idols.  And what they apparently wanted to see, more than anything else, were the ideals he seemed to represent. Not a mere man.

A mere man is how the astonished music critic Ludwig Rellstab described him upon meeting him in 1825.  Though surprised that Beethoven appeared to him so ordinary, he had to ask himself  "why should  Beethoven's features look like his scores?"

Beethoven moved easily in aristocratic circles and was often patronized by its members. He dedicated his works to them in return.  But Beethoven did not consider himself subservient to any of them. One of his famous diatribes is a rebuke to a prince in which he shouts that there are hundred of princes (there were) "but only one Beethoven!"  It is also said that Beethoven refused to pay any respect to a party of aristocrats near Teplitz (see the above painting), while his walking companion, the famous poet Goethe, stood at the side of the road with his hat off.  The source for this tale is Beethoven himself, in a letter dated August 14th 1812 to Bettina von Arnim. The problem is that the letter may not be authentic. Ms. von Arnim became quite famous for her publications of letters from both Goethe and Beethoven but does not seem to have been above making history more interesting than it originally was. Still, many take the incident for historical fact (and some date the incident from July rather than August so that it actually occurred during Beethoven's visit to Goethe and not a month later when none of the parties involved were in town!), and it does seem to illustrate something fundamental about the character of each (particularly the character we think we know). So, did it happen? It might have--or at least, we want it to have happened. Enough then. It did!

If Beethoven's uncompromising behavior was what most drew the attention of the Viennese, it would be no surprise if the Beethoven they saw in pictures began somehow to resemble a defiant revolutionary. But Beethoven's appearance, at least at first, remained stubbornly unremarkable.

To begin with, his face apparently had a few scars and deformities, the results of a possible struggle with smallpox or some other infectious disease which left a lingering signature. Though testimony to this facial misfortune is given repeatedly in print, it is consistently "edited out" when his portrait is painted.

The nose, apparently, was revised as well, being a bit larger than is commonly represented. The biggest problem, however, seems to have been with the eyes, which are often depicted as gazing heavenward, steely, fiery. More often in his portrait sittings he was probably distracted. He hated to sit for them very long, and, as there came a steady stream of persons wanting him to sit for them, he adopted a regimen of inviting them into his study and then ignoring them, improvising at the piano for hours and forgetting that they were there. One of his favorite painters was a man named Klober who came in unannounced, left unannounced, said not a word, and simply went on with his work while Beethoven worked. Like a good naturalist observing Beethoven in the wild he must have had to imagine something of the character Beethoven's features would assume had he been paying attention to the proceedings.