Johann Georg Platzer

Johann Georg Platzer painted his crowded little worlds on sheets of copper rather than canvas, because the smooth metal let him lay down enamel-bright colour and detail so fine you almost have to lean in. A single panel the size of a book cover might hold dozens of figures at a feast, a dance or a mythological revel, each with its own glinting silk, wine glass and gesture.

He was born in 1704 in Eppan, in what is now South Tyrol, into a family of painters, and learned the trade from a stepfather and an uncle before settling in Vienna. There his conversation pieces, festive scenes of the well-off at leisure, found a wealthy public that prized exactly this kind of virtuoso finish. His busiest and finest years fell in the later 1730s.

Platzer stayed loyal to the small format his whole career, turning out cabinet pictures meant to be owned and studied up close rather than hung across a hall. He died back in Eppan in 1761.