Graz 1703 – 1761 Vienna
A Pair of Palace Interiors with Elegant Figures Dancing and Merrymaking
An exemplary pair of elegant palace interiors with figures dancing and merrymaking by Franz Christoph Janneck was sold by Nicholas Hall, on behalf of a private collector, to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
signature and inscription
left: signed and dated ‘F.C. Janneck. fec 1752’, lower left
right: signed with monogram ‘FCJ’, lower left, on the stool
Provenance
W.P. Nicholson, Tootal Broadhurst
by descent to his wife, Mrs. Puckle
London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 1991, lot 12 (sold for £75,000)
with Richard Green, London
The Cunningham Collection, acquired directly from the above
New York, Christie’s, 2 June 2015, lot 29
Private Collection, New York
with Nicholas Hall, by 2022
sold to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virgina
essay
The celebrated Austrian painter Franz Christoph Janneck was born in Graz, where he initially trained under Matthias Vangus. In the 1730s, Janneck moved to Vienna, but would spend most of the decade traveling throughout Austria and southern Germany. In 1740, he enrolled at the Viennese Academy and eventually held the post of Assessor from 1752 to 1758, supervising the administration of the Academy alongside his fellow artists Paul Troger and Michelangelo Unterberger.
While he painted a wide range of subjects, Janneck is best known for highly finished, jewel-like cabinet pictures of merrymaking aristocrats, typically executed on copper. These works were prized for their sparkling tonality, refined details, and a multitude of seemingly innocuous anecdotes – a nod to the hidden symbolism in Dutch and Flemish genre paintings a century earlier. Taking cues from Antoine Watteau, who championed the so-called fête galantes, Janneck frequently depicted graceful companies making music, dancing and conversing in the park. Typically dressed in fancy costumes, these figures reveal the artist’s interest in opera and theatre through a refined expression of the Commedia dell’arte spirit.
In 1996, the Residenzgalerie in Salzburg organized an exhibition entitled Reich mir die Hand, mein Leben – a line from Mozart’s Don Giovanni – honoring Janneck and Johann Georg Platzer, highlighting the two leading Viennese artists’ distinctive contribution to visualizing music in the composer’s lifetime. While many of Janneck’s elegant soirées take place in pastoral settings (National Gallery Prague, Inv. O 10539), the present pair is a notable take on the genre of gallery interior pictures, which we illustrate with two other examples in All That Glistens. Both Janneck (Niederösterreichische Landesmuseum, inv.A 284/86) and Platzer (National Museum in Warsaw, M.Ob.1005 MNW) are known to have painted other works, on a smaller scale, of such scenes. The present two paintings are surely among the finest and most ambitious examples of this type.