Spain for one year, accompanied by his student, Ernst Friedrich von Liphart, to make more copies of the Old Masters for Schack. Upon returning, his career as a portrait painter began in earnest. His breakthrough came in 1869, when he won a gold medal at the Glaspalast, despite being up against many fashionable French painters. After 1870, he began making visits to Vienna to develop a market for his paintings there, which even survived the Panic of 1873. It is also said that he travelled there frequently because he had a passion for Maria Beccadelli di Bologna, which was never returned. From 1875 to 1876 he, Hans Makart, and other associates made a trip to Egypt, which left a deep impression in his style. In 1882, he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown, which entitled him to become "Von Lenbach". The following year, he was back in Rome, where he lived in apartments at the Palazzo Borghese. One of his sitters was Clara Schumann, whose portrait he drew in pastel in 1878. In 1885, he was commissioned to do a portrait of Pope Leo XIII. As the Pope did not have time to sit for the portrait, a new technique was used to create a photographic template. He left Rome in 1887 and began building a villa in Munich. Later that year, he married Countess Magdalena Moltke. By the 1890s, he was painting almost entirely from photographs, a common practice at the time, but he also began working too fast, in an effort to create sufficient income. In 1895, a major scandal erupted when one of his assistants took unfinished paintings and sketches, had students fill in the details, and passed them off as Lenbach's work. In 1896, he and Magdalena were divorced, over suspicions of infidelity with her doctor, Ernst Schweninger,whom she did in fact later marry. Lenbach also remarried, to Charlotte von Hornstein, daughter of the composer Robert von Hornstein. He refused to join the Munich Secession and was highly critical of the new Bavarian National Museum. He also began to paint women, almost exclusively, whereas before he had concentrated on men. Around 1900, he started to produce trading card designs for the Stollwerck chocolate company of Cologne. In 1902, he became an honorary Knight in the Légion d’Honneur. That same year, he suffered a stroke while returning from a trip to his home