Caspar Franz Sambach

This small canvas of Saint Teresa of Ávila carried up into heaven was painted before 1763 by a man who spent most of his working life at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Caspar Franz Sambach came to Vienna from Breslau, today's Wrocław, in 1740. He worked in the studio of the sculptor Georg Raphael Donner and studied painting under Paul Troger, a leading fresco painter of Austrian churches.

That double training shaped his speciality, grey monochrome paintings that imitate carved reliefs in Donner's manner. Most of his altarpieces and frescoes went to churches in Moravia and Hungary. From 1773 until his death in 1795 he directed the Academy's school of painting and engraving.