Flowers and Fruit

Around 1715 Prince Eugene of Savoy, the Habsburg army's great field commander, was furnishing the Belvedere, his new summer residence on the edge of Vienna. This still life was painted for it, to sit above a door in his conference room, so it belongs to the building's original decoration. When the imperial family later bought the estate, the picture went into the imperial painting collection, and at some point it was cut down from a rectangle to the oval it is today. Inside that oval, Tamm sets a halved watermelon on the ground with bunches of pale and dark grapes beside it. Behind them rises a stone vase carved with figures, packed with striped carnations, white snowball blossoms and blue morning glories. Today it hangs in the Upper Belvedere, in the palace it was painted for.