Heinrich Füger

Heinrich Füger began small, in the most literal sense. As a boy in Heilbronn, in southwest Germany, he showed a gift for portrait miniatures, paintings a few centimeters across meant to be held in the hand, and two of them were already on show in Dresden by 1769. A scholarship sent him to Rome in 1776, where the painter Anton Raphael Mengs, the leading champion of the new Neoclassical taste, shaped his sense of clear line and cool, sculpted form.

The rest of his life ran through Vienna's official art world. In 1783 the Habsburg state chancellor brought him to the Academy of Fine Arts, then one of the most important in Europe. He became its director in 1795 and, in 1806, director of the imperial picture gallery at the Belvedere palace. From that seat he painted the emperor's family and the Viennese aristocracy, and turned out large history pieces in the antique manner. He also kept making the miniatures he had started with, right up to his death in Vienna in 1818.