Jan Kupecký

Jan Kupecký spent his life a step ahead of religious pressure. His parents were Czech Protestants, members of the Bohemian Brethren, who left their homeland for Royal Hungary to escape the Catholic authorities, and he was born there in 1667, in Pezinok, a town near what is now Bratislava.

He trained under a Swiss painter, Benedikt Klaus, then went south as a young man and stayed for more than twenty years, mostly in Venice and Rome, building a reputation as a portraitist before returning north to settle in Vienna in 1709. Sitters came steadily, princes, churchmen, scholars and wealthy merchants, and engravings after his portraits carried his name across the German lands. He is said to have painted the Russian tsar Peter the Great during the ruler's stay at a Bohemian spa.

In 1733, still a Protestant in Catholic Vienna, he moved his family once more, this time to the free imperial city of Nuremberg, where Lutherans could live unmolested. He worked there until his death in 1740, and his own searching self-portraits are among the pictures for which he is still remembered.