Biography

Bohemian painter, the most important landscape painter in Bohemia in the early eighteenth century. Although little is known about his early training, he lived from 1702 in Prague, where he was able to study the collections of Rudolph II. He updated themes found in Flemish art of the sixteenth-century for eighteenth-century audiences, and was particularly influenced by the works of Gillis van Coninxloo and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

His paintings were much sought after by his contemporaries and found their way into the Imperial Collections in Vienna, Bamberg, Prague and Schleissheim and into the castles of Bohemia. His sons, Franz Anton (1694-1728) and Wenzel Johann (1700-1745) were also painters.