According to the customs of the day, a wedding memorial portrait was made of the nineteen- year-old Maria Weidenhoffer and her groom, who was exactly twenty years older. Following the usual arrangement of portraits of couples, the man’s figure is looking at the audience, turning towards the woman on his right, while the woman, wearing a blue wedding dress in the fashion of the time, is positioned in the opposite direction. The couple of portraits was painted by Ágost Elek Canzi (1808-1866), an Austrian painter born in Baden near Vienna, who after studying in Stuttgart spent fifteen years in Paris visiting Ingres’s studio. He moved to Budapest in 1846 and became famous as a portrait painter. He was especially popular among women for his mawkish painting style, but he also produced Biedermeier portraits of István Széchenyi, Ferenc Deák and Mihály Vörösmarty. Apart from a childhood picture, this is the only portrait paited of Semmelweis during his lifetime, therefore the features depicted by Canzi can be discovered in several of his posthumous portraits. In later photographs he has an older, more broken look.
