The Painter Joseph Rosa

In 1776 the Empress Maria Theresa and Joseph II, her son and co-ruler, decided to move the imperial picture collection from the cramped Stallburg, part of the Hofburg palace, to the Upper Belvedere. The man in charge of the move is the one in this portrait, Joseph Rosa, a Viennese painter of landscapes and animals who was then director of the imperial gallery. He began hanging the pictures by national school, an arrangement soon replaced by that of Christian von Mechel, a dealer from Basel, and from 1781 the public could visit. Martin Knoller painted him in 1791, at about 65, in a blue coat and a ruffled shirt, holding a pen over a portfolio before a wooded landscape. The portrait entered the emperor's collection in 1804, and today it hangs in the Upper Belvedere, the palace whose walls Rosa once filled.