Painted by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl in 1815, this portrait shows Arthur Schopenhauer at age twenty-seven, two years after the publication of his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and four years before the appearance of his masterwork The World as Will and Representation (1819). The young Schopenhauer of the Ruhl portrait is at the moment of intellectual self-definition, having broken with the Kantian academy of his teachers and committed himself to the doctrine of the world as the objectification of an irrational, blind metaphysical Will that would shape his entire philosophical output.

Schopenhauer (1788 to 1860) is the systematic philosopher of pessimism. His extension of Kantian transcendental idealism through the recognition of the Will as the thing-in-itself transformed Kant's epistemological framework into a metaphysics of suffering and renunciation. The compassion ethics of On the Basis of Morality (1840), the aesthetics of music as the direct objectification of the Will in The World as Will and Representation, and the late aphorisms of Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) shaped the conceptual world of Wagner, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Borges, Beckett, Wittgenstein, and Freud.

The painting hangs in the Schopenhauer-Archiv at the Frankfurt University Library, the principal collection of Schopenhauer manuscripts and iconography. Schopenhauer lived the final decades of his life as a private scholar in Frankfurt, where he died in 1860 just as his reputation, dormant for forty years, was finally beginning to consolidate as the foundation for the late-nineteenth-century revolt against Hegelian idealism. The Ruhl portrait is the canonical image of the young Schopenhauer; the equally famous late photographs by Jakob Schäfer record the bitter and disabused old age.