Family Portrait

This portrait of a mother and child joined the imperial collection in 1780, a gift from Prince Wenzel Anton Kaunitz, Maria Theresa's long-serving state chancellor. The imperial paintings had just been moved into the Upper Belvedere, where the Basel engraver Christian von Mechel was rehanging them by school and period, and in 1781 the palace opened those rooms to the public. Who the sitters were is not recorded, and Kupecký left the canvas unsigned. The museum dates it to the early 1720s, when he was working in Vienna. A woman wrapped in heavy red velvet rests her hand on a boy's shoulder. The boy holds up an oval miniature of a man in a wig, a third person present only as a picture. The painting later spent decades at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and returned to the Belvedere in 1922.