Joseph Roos the Elder

In 1776 the imperial picture collection in Vienna was still packed into the Stallburg, the wing of the Hofburg palace that also housed the court stables. The man put in charge of moving it to the Upper Belvedere, Prince Eugene's former summer palace, was a painter of cows and meadows, Joseph Roos, known in Vienna as Joseph Rosa.

He came from a whole dynasty of animal painters. His grandfather Philipp Peter Roos had made his name in Italy as Rosa da Tivoli, and his father Cajetan taught him the family trade of pastoral landscapes with cattle. After the Vienna Academy he went to Dresden, first as a decorative painter under the stage designer Giuseppe Galli Bibiena, then as a court painter and professor of landscape at the academy founded there in 1764. The two versions of Landscape with Grazing Cattle in this collection, dated 1765 and 1766, come from those Dresden years.

In 1772 he was appointed director of the imperial collections. He hung the paintings by national schools, an arrangement later reworked by the Swiss engraver Christian von Mechel before the gallery opened to the public in 1781, and he wrote the first catalogue of the collection built on art-historical principles. The Tyrolean painter Martin Knoller portrayed him in 1791, and that portrait now hangs in the Upper Belvedere.