Girl at the Lottery

In the late 1820s the lottery was one of the great talking points in Vienna, and in 1829 Peter Fendi painted a young woman caught up in it. She has stopped with a basket at a lottery office. A board shows the numbers of the Vienna draw, and a framed notice says Wednesday is the last day to play the smaller draw for Linz. Nearby, a figure of a man in Turkish dress smokes a long pipe above a glass case of pipes. She holds a slip of paper and presses her other hand to her cheek. Perhaps she has just lost, perhaps she is weighing another try, and the picture leaves it open. The painting counts among the first genre scenes in 19th-century Austrian art. At the Academy exhibition of 1830 it was warmly praised, and that same year Emperor Francis I bought it for his collection.