Franz Werner Tamm

Around 1686 a young flower and fruit painter from Hamburg arrived in Rome, and he stayed for ten years. Franz Werner Tamm, born in 1658 and trained at home under local painters, worked there alongside the Flemish landscape painters Jan Frans and Pieter van Bloemen. Carlo Maratta, the most powerful painter in Rome, and Gaspar van Wittel, the Dutch painter of city views, recommended him to important patrons. His still lifes grew out of the circle of Abraham Brueghel, a Flemish flower painter working in Italy. In Rome in 1692 he married Giustina, the sister of an Augsburg goldsmith.

From 1695 he is recorded as a painter to the imperial court in Vienna, and from 1707 he also worked for the Prince of Liechtenstein there. Around 1702 he was in Passau painting altarpieces. His pictures set flowers and fruit against landscape views, classical ruins and carved vases, and in later years he turned more to hunting still lifes and animals. He worked in Vienna until his death in 1724, and three of his sons followed him into the arts, Kaspar and Franz as painters and Jakob as a goldsmith.