Anna Maria Punz

Three pictures, all painted in 1754, all the same size, all signed. That is the entire known work of Anna Maria Punz, and all three hang in the Belvedere in Vienna.

They are kitchen still lifes. A basket of apples, a jug beside a tulip, crockery with an onion and a kohlrabi. At a time when still lifes were usually lavish displays, she set a few ordinary things at the edge of a shelf and painted them with great precision and careful light. Scholars have compared them with Dutch still lifes of the century before.

Her life is known only from parish records in Persenbeug, a small town on the Danube in Lower Austria, where she was born in 1721 and died in 1794. She was married to the painter Georg Albert Punz, and the register records her at death as a burgher painter, a townswoman who painted for a living. Where she trained, and for whom she worked, is unknown. The Belvedere bought the three canvases in 1983.