Franz Christoph Janneck

Franz Christoph Janneck painted his Presentation in the Temple in 1758 on a sheet of copper, 44 by 36 centimetres. He specialised in small, highly finished cabinet pictures meant to be looked at from close up, and copper gave him the smooth, hard surface that detail of that fineness needs.

He was born in Graz in 1703 into a family of painters and first trained there with the still-life painter Matthias Vangus. In Vienna from 1726 he came into contact with Johann Georg Platzer, a fellow Austrian known for crowded little scenes on copper, and he is also said to have studied in Frankfurt with the landscape painter Joseph Orient.

His favourite subjects were festive companies. The Belvedere's pair of Outdoor Merriment scenes from around 1740, one with dancing and one with wine and song, show that side of him and the Dutch and French taste he leaned on from about then. Janneck also painted figures and animals into other painters' landscapes. In the 1750s he held office at the Vienna Academy alongside the fresco painter Paul Troger, and he died in Vienna in 1761.