This well-known portrait of Hegel inspired the poet Heinrich Heine to declare: "with his nightcap and his night-shirt tatters, he botches up the loopholes in the structure of the world."

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Context 1

... this context, we could also think of what is perhaps the first portrait of a philosopher in such an intimate setting (although the amount of books in the background lend the scene a much more studious atmosphere), a lithograph by Julius Ludwig Sebbers (1804-?) in which Hegel, the magician of the abstract, is pictured in a dressing gown and a nightcap (Figure 2). If there is something intuitively appealing about these two images, it might be the fact that they can be taken as visual embodiments of the supremely "antiphilosophical" gesture of bringing a discourse often associated with exalted and mystifying pronouncements concerning the unconditioned back down to earth. ...