Johann Christian Brand

In 1775 the new engraving school at the Vienna Academy brought out one of its first projects, a series of about 40 prints of the people who sold things and services in the city's streets. There is a flower seller, a chicken dealer, a laundress, a man selling snails, a postman, many of them with the call they used to cry their trade. The drawings behind the prints were by Johann Christian Brand, and the series, known as the Kaufruf, the Cries of Vienna, started a whole line of pictures of Viennese types.

Brand was above all a landscape painter. Born in Vienna in 1722, the son of the landscape painter Christian Hilfgott Brand, he entered the Academy in 1736. In 1758 he painted a set of views of Laxenburg, the imperial country residence south of Vienna, looking out from its garden pavilions across the flat land toward Mödling and the villages beyond. He became chamber painter to the court in 1766 and professor of landscape drawing at the Academy in 1772, and as late as 1790 he painted the Danube valley seen from the Bisamberg, a hill north of the city. He died in Vienna in 1795.