Thomas Ender

In 1817 the Habsburg archduchess Leopoldina married the Portuguese crown prince Pedro and left for Brazil, and Austria sent a party of scientists along. Its official painter was a 23-year-old landscape student from the Vienna Academy, Thomas Ender. Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, had just bought his prize-winning canvas and put his name forward.

In less than a year around Rio de Janeiro, Ender made more than 700 drawings and watercolours of streets, harbour views, plantations and forest, and of the enslaved Africans he saw at work. They are a rich record of Rio in those years, and they are kept today in the print room of the Vienna Academy.

Back in Europe he followed Metternich to Rome and stayed there on a state stipend until 1823. His twin brother Johann Nepomuk Ender, meanwhile, made his own career as a portrait and history painter. In 1828 Thomas became chamber painter to Archduke Johann, the emperor's brother, who had painters record the Alpine lands he loved, and in 1837 he travelled with him as far as Istanbul and Greece. He then taught landscape at the Academy until 1851. The Belvedere's view of the Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain, with the Pasterze glacier below it, was painted in 1832, in those Alpine years.