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A particularly elitist pleasure is to collect art. Art collectors prove themselves before the world: They display an all-round education and exquisite taste, as well as wealth and social status. Art forms that had previously been held in lesser regard, the landscape, genre and still life, are appreciated by collectors in the late Baroque period. Small-format paintings fill castles and patricians’ houses where painting cabinets are set up as galleries and proudly displayed. Like the salons of the time they are places for conversing about art and centres of a new bourgeois culture of collecting.
The connoisseur especially appreciates the rural idyll, which gently romanticises the mostly hard life of the peasants. In Vienna, it is mainly Franz de Paula Ferg whose pictures precisely match the taste of the times. Above all, the highest level of technical precision is called for. The model is the fijnschilder art of Dutch masters, which casts a shimmering glow in the candlelight.
