Reviewed by: The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle by Annette Richards Paul Corneilson (bio) Annette Richards. The Temple of Fame and Friendship: Portraits, Music, and History in the C. P. E. Bach Circle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 332 pp. I personally have been waiting for this book for several years, after working with author Annette Richards on Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Portrait Collection, in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works.1 The book grew out of her reconstruction of most of the portraits that C. P. E. Bach collected and that were listed in the composer's estate catalogue in 1790 following his death in December 1788. As Richards points out, "Bach's was not the only collection of musician portraits known to contemporaries, but it was by far the largest and most significant" (3). Of the 300 or so portraits listed in the estate catalogue, Richards assembled more than two-thirds of them in her edition.2 I edited the appendices for the Portrait Collection, which included the portraits of C. P. E. Bach and his family, not listed in the estate catalogue, as well as his collection of silhouettes.3 Richards begins appropriately enough with Charles Burney, who experienced Bach's collection firsthand when he visited the composer in Hamburg in October 1772: When I went to his house, I found with him three or four rational, and well-bred persons, his friends, besides his own family, consisting of Mrs. Bach, his eldest son, who practises the law, and his daughter. The instant I entered, he conducted me up stairs, into a large and elegant music room, furnished with pictures, drawings, and prints of more than a hundred and fifty eminent musicians: [End Page 142] among whom, there are many Englishmen, and original portraits, in oil, of his father and grandfather.4 The oil portraits of his father and grandfather, Johann Sebastian and Johann Ambrosius, are the famous ones now held by the Bach-Archiv Leipzig.5 The estate catalogue mentions dozens of portraits framed under glass, which confirms that almost half of the collection was on display in Bach's home. Burney mentions in a footnote to the passage cited above that Bach "has two sons, the youngest of whom studies painting, at the academies of Leipzic and Dresden." This son, Johann Sebastian Bach the Younger, after studying with Adam Friedrich Oeser in Leipzig, eventually traveled to Rome, where he died in 1778. Richards discusses how much his artist son meant to Bach, and speculates that the Rondo in A Minor Wq 56 no. 5 might have been written to express his grief over the loss of his son (217–24). In any event, it is clear that Bach was proud of his son, and the estate catalogue (131–42) includes an appendix of the engravings of Johann Sebastian the Younger. (Richards includes a reproduction of his Arcadian Landscape with Aqueduct and Temple on a Hill from 1775 as plate 5.) Richards takes the reader on a tour of eighteenth-century portraiture, through seven chapters focused on exhibiting, collecting, speculating (on resemblance), character, friendship, feeling, and memorializing. Though the book is grounded in one individual's collection, her observations are wide ranging and multidisciplinary. This does justice not only to the topic, but also to the central subject of the book, C. P. E. Bach himself. Of all the Bach sons, he had the broadest education and was the most respected and influential Bach [End Page 143] in the eighteenth century. C. P. E. Bach would have been exposed to the art in Frederick the Great's collection at Sansouci and Berlin and was familiar with at least some of the art at the Dresden court, too. J. S. Bach the Younger made a copy of Anton Mengs's portrait of Caterina Mingotti in Dresden, which was in C. P. E. Bach's collection (23). In Hamburg he got to know the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, who had his own portrait collection of his friends. His publisher Breitkopf in Leipzig also sent Bach engravings, and his late correspondence with Johann Jakob Heinrich...