Self-Portrait at the Easel

In 1828 the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna held its exhibition, and the imperial picture gallery bought this self-portrait there. Lampi was nearly 77. Decades earlier he had painted a king and an empress, and here he shows himself with none of that grandeur, in a plain grey coat, a green waistcoat and a white cravat. He sits in an armchair holding a drawing tool, his arm resting on a red portfolio. Behind him stands a canvas with only the first thin lines of a man's head on it, a portrait at its very beginning. The same exhibition showed a sleeping Venus by his son and namesake, Johann Baptist the Younger. Lampi died in Vienna two years later, in 1830.