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Lot Essay
This wonderfully dynamic and animated scene was painted by the most important master of the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Austria, Johann Georg Platzer. It is believed to have been commissioned by Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, aide-de-camp to the Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709-62), who served as first Russian Minister of Education and founded the Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1757.
Platzer’s lively palette and idiosyncratic technique are beautifully displayed throughout the composition, notably in details such as the central figure’s sumptuous pink dress, the richly textured carpet and masterfully captured life-drawing class in the left background. It was originally conceived as a pendant to a picture depicting The Artist’s Studio, which was sold at Sotheby’s, London, 12 December 1990, lot 28 (£190,000). The subject was one that the artist frequently returned to and this copper can be compared with The Sculptor’s Studio in the Vienna Museum. The artist was clearly pleased with the present work, since he included a self-portrait in the picture, drawing in the far right of the composition, and signed the painting on the pedestal of the sculpted urn, immediately below his own portrait (see detail).
Born into a family of painters in the southern Tyrol, Platzer became the chief exponent of the Austrian Rococo style. Predominantly a painter of history, allegories and conversation pieces, it was the brilliant colours and meticulous finish of his small-scale cabinet paintings, of which the present painting is an excellent example, that established Platzer's reputation as the unrivalled exponent of his field. His only serious competitor in this genre was his friend, Franz Christoph Janneck, whom he met upon his arrival at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Vienna in 1726, and who painted a number of works in a very similar, if somewhat less detailed, manner. Platzer's miniaturist technique and predilection for the use of copper as a support reveal his debt to the Leiden fijnschilders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Platzer’s lively palette and idiosyncratic technique are beautifully displayed throughout the composition, notably in details such as the central figure’s sumptuous pink dress, the richly textured carpet and masterfully captured life-drawing class in the left background. It was originally conceived as a pendant to a picture depicting The Artist’s Studio, which was sold at Sotheby’s, London, 12 December 1990, lot 28 (£190,000). The subject was one that the artist frequently returned to and this copper can be compared with The Sculptor’s Studio in the Vienna Museum. The artist was clearly pleased with the present work, since he included a self-portrait in the picture, drawing in the far right of the composition, and signed the painting on the pedestal of the sculpted urn, immediately below his own portrait (see detail).
Born into a family of painters in the southern Tyrol, Platzer became the chief exponent of the Austrian Rococo style. Predominantly a painter of history, allegories and conversation pieces, it was the brilliant colours and meticulous finish of his small-scale cabinet paintings, of which the present painting is an excellent example, that established Platzer's reputation as the unrivalled exponent of his field. His only serious competitor in this genre was his friend, Franz Christoph Janneck, whom he met upon his arrival at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Vienna in 1726, and who painted a number of works in a very similar, if somewhat less detailed, manner. Platzer's miniaturist technique and predilection for the use of copper as a support reveal his debt to the Leiden fijnschilders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.