Life Class in the Vienna Academy (detail)

1787 · Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna

genre

This painting presents the most prominent personalities of the college, including the painter himself sitting on a stool and drawing. To the right of Quadal, Friedrich Heinrich Füger is painting with verve, and behind his easel Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder is depicted. To the right of the model's platform the councilor Maulbertsch is dazzled by the light.

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Life Class in the Vienna Academy (detail)

About the Artist

Martin Ferdinand Quadal

1736 – 1808

Moravian painter, itinerant throughout Europe. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and then in 1767 in Paris; he was employed there by Louis-Joseph, Prince de Condé and was especially successful with his pictures of horses. In the course of his career he travelled widely, on different occasions throughout the 1770s working in England and Ireland and exhibiting his portraits and hunting pictures at the Royal Academy. In 1784 he travelled to Italy, visiting Rome and Naples, and he subsequently visited Vienna (1787), the Netherlands (1794) and Hamburg (1796); from 1797 until his death he was in St Petersburg.

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