Still Life with Chamois

Prince Eugene of Savoy received his visitors in a suite of state rooms on the garden side of the Upper Belvedere, two antechambers, an audience room and a gilded cabinet. This canvas was made around 1720 for the parade and audience room, and its arched top shows where it went, above a door. The same room had a second overdoor of the same size, a still life with a crane, and the museum attributes both to Franz Werner Tamm. Irises, tulips, carnations and morning glories crowd out of a stone vase, loose roses lie on the ground, and beside the vase stands a chamois, the Alpine goat-antelope, half in shadow. The Second World War badly damaged the palace, and little of these rooms' original furnishing survives. Most of Tamm's overdoors ended up in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which in 2013 lent this one back to the Belvedere.