Both inscribed "AUGUSTE VON GRAEFE GEB: VON ALTEN" und "CARL v. GRAEFE". Auguste von Alten (1797 - 1857) was married in 1814 to the military surgeon Karl Ferdinand Graefe (1787 - 1840), who was raised to the rank of hereditary Polish nobility in 1826. Carl Friedrich August was born in 1818, the second of their five children. He later worked in the Prussian civil service as a privy councillor. He died in 1872. The family lived in a house built by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the "Finkenheerd" in Berlin s Tiergarten. The connection to the sculptor Friedrich Drake (1805 - 1882) probably also came about through Schinkel. After studying with Christian Daniel Rauch, Drake began to create portrait busts in 1828, which, in addition to official commissions from the royal family, provided him with a solid source of income over the years. His most famous work is the Victory Column crowned by a personification of victory in Berlin s Tiergarten. Drake portrayed Karl Friedrich Schinkel several times throughout his lifetime. The motif of the cloth over the hair of Auguste von Graefe is found again in a model for the tomb of Pauline Duchess of Nassau-Weilburg, dated 1859, today in the model collection of the National Gallery (Maaz ed., op. cit., no. 226), and thus possibly refers to the fact that Auguste von Graefe was already deceased at the time the bust was produced.来源: Provenance From the property of a Prussian aristocrat.Cast bronze with caramel coloured and gold patina.