Paul Troger

1698 Welsberg – 1762 Vienna

Little is known of Troger’s youth and training. Of fundamental importance for his artistic development was a journey he made to Venice, where he was greatly influenced by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Sebastiano Ricci and, above all, Giovanni Battista Pittoni. The present print dates to 1721, immediately after his return from Italy. Troger‘s rise began shortly afterwards in Vienna, where in the course of his life he produced a considerable body of work, ranking alongside Daniel Gran and Raphael Donner as one of the key artistic figures in Austrian painting in the first half of the 18th century. Paul Troger’s printed work is rare and still not comprehensively researched. Nagler describes a total of twenty-three etchings, two of which are considered questionable, and even the monograph by W. Aschenbrenner and G. Schweighofer (Paul Troger, Leben und Werk, Salzburg 1965) did not add anything to the existing oeuvre. Troger’s etchings are distinguished by an individual and technically sophisticated treatment, not the least of their charms being the originality of their iconography.