An elegant company making merry in a palace garden

This vibrant copper depicting a musical party in a classical garden was painted by the most important master of the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Austria, Johann Georg Platzer. The artist’s idiosyncratic style was assimilated though his study of contemporary French Rococo painting and the Leiden fijnschilders of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who shared Platzer’s predilection for the use of copper plates as a support.

Platzer’s lively palette and miniaturist-like technique are here beautifully displayed, notably in the variety of materials of the fabrics worn by the assembled cast of richly attired figures and the Turkish carpet nearby. The picture was originally conceived as a pendant to a copper showing A concert rehearsal in a lavish interior, which was exhibited (as no. 17) alongside the present work in the 1969 Salzburg exhibition.

Born into a family of painters in the southern Tyrol, Platzer became the chief exponent of the Austrian Rococo style. Predominantly a painter of history, allegories and conversation pieces, it was the brilliant colors and meticulous finish of his small-scale cabinet pictures, of which the present painting is an excellent example, that established Platzer's reputation as the unrivalled exponent of his field. Indeed, his only serious rival in this genre was his friend, Franz Christoph Janneck, whom he had met upon his arrival at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Vienna in 1726, and who painted in a very similar, if somewhat less detailed, manner.