Still Life with Crane

For a long time this canvas went under the name of Johann Baptist Haelszel, a painter who worked in Vienna and died there in 1777. The museum now dates it to around 1720, when Haelszel, born around 1710, would still have been a boy, and attributes the unsigned picture to the Hamburg-born still-life painter Franz Werner Tamm. It was one of the overdoors Prince Eugene of Savoy ordered for the audience room of his Upper Belvedere, and a second one of the same size shows a chamois. Here a crane takes the foreground, a tall bird with a dark body, a white stripe down its neck and a red patch on its crown. Beside it a stone vase of roses, carnations and tulips stands on a pedestal. At the bird's feet lie a split pomegranate, pears, grapes, plums and a cabbage.