This portrait of Henrik Czerny led to a misunderstanding in art history, as it was dated to a decade too early, assuming that the subject is the artist’s father-in-law instead of brother-in-law. Jakopič painted his peer and friend in a modern, urban salon, perhaps even in Czerny’s apartment, seated upon a secessionist settee between two windows that open the room up towards the opposing light. The painter took a stance directly in front of his subject, clearly painting him while standing somewhat above him. Dressed sharply in the urbane style, Henrik Czerny’s posture is ambivalent. He seems to be seated comfortably, but his right hand, placed across his lap and keeping his cane and top hat in place, hints at internal tension, even impatience at being forced to keep still and pose. The composition is designed in planes parallel to the painting’s surface, and so the subject’s thighs and the back of the settee are spatially contracted. Above his head hangs a painting in a double stick frame with its own source of internal illumination. The enigmatic arrangement of the peacock feathers behind the settee makes for a true Peacock Throne, though it is doubtful Jakopič was familiar with the symbolism of the Mayura Throne in the Indian tradition. It would be easier to understand in the Ovidian sense as an attribute of the guardian to his younger sister Ana Czerny, though their mother, nee Kraschewitz, had been deceased since 1883. Nonetheless, the feathers arranged into a true tail and situated in the painting as the upper part of a mandorla make it hard to resist an attempt at a symbolic interpretation of that extraordinary detail. This urban portrait is one of Jakopič’s earliest impressionist works, as he interpreted the contrasts formed by the opposing light source and the deep shadows with an intense palette of clashing blue and yellow with red embellishments around the core of the subject’s white shirt.