Carl Schindler

Recruitment, the small panel of 1838 in the Belvedere, is the work of a teenager. Carl Schindler was 16 or 17 when he painted it, a Viennese boy who had drawn soldiers since childhood with the encouragement of his father, the painter and engraver Johann Josef Schindler. In Vienna he became known as Soldier Schindler.

He entered the Vienna Academy in 1836 and then took private lessons from Peter Fendi, a family friend and one of the city's leading Biedermeier painters. Fendi showed him the French military artists of the day, draughtsmen such as Raffet and Charlet. Schindler rarely painted battles or heroic deeds. He preferred the everyday life of soldiers, and so brought military painting close to the genre painting of ordinary scenes.

He had tuberculosis, and illness kept interrupting his studies. In 1842 he went to Laab im Walde, a village in the Vienna Woods, to try a water cure. He died there that August, aged 20.