'Portrait of Count Anton Lamberg-Sprinzenstein'

[Click image for a little more about this painting, plus enlargable image.]

Martin Ferdinand Quadal

Portrait of Count Anton Lamberg-Sprinzenstein, 1784

Oil on canvas, w77 cm x h101 cm

Akademie der bildended Künste, Vienna, Austria

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Going to be a busy month finishing up a few painting commissions before the holidays, and everything I've got on the plate currently involves a people-and-animal combo. So going to meditate on that for awhile (and also that was my subtle way of saying that posts are going to continue to be text-light until the queue can be cleared more).

Paintings of people with animals tend to be more fun than frustrating, but it's still an area with some surprising pitfalls — probably because a few artists prefer to specialize, either painting faces as portraitists or animals as animaliers, and sometimes if they have to do a picture that includes both, they have trouble stretching their style to include both smoothly. I'll round up a few of my favorite oopses by otherwise-solid artists later this week, but I find the painting above to be by contrast a very happy thing, so we'll lead with that instead.

Also, have to note that those are some...chewy names there, on both the artist and the subject. But, you know, if reincarnation ends up being a thing and the afterlife takes requests, I'd rather like a pass at life as Count Anton Lamberg-Sprinzenstein.