Martin Ferdinand Quadal

In 1787 Martin Ferdinand Quadal painted the life-drawing room of the Vienna Academy, then housed in the St. Anna building, filled with the men who ran Viennese art. The fresco painter Franz Anton Maulbertsch is there, with the portraitists Heinrich Füger and Johann Baptist Lampi and the sculptor Franz Anton Zauner, and Quadal put himself in as well. The canvas, about two metres wide, still belongs to the Academy.

He knew that room because he had trained there, although he rarely stayed anywhere for long. Born in Moravia in 1736, he worked in France, England and Italy, and he was known above all as a painter of animals, horses in particular, alongside portraits and still lifes. The Belvedere's Cats and Fish, painted in 1781, comes from that side of his work.

In 1797 he accepted an invitation from Emperor Paul I and went to St Petersburg. After two years in London he returned there, and he died in the Russian capital.