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Johann Baptist Drechsler was an Austrian painter specialised in flower painting. He was the director of a branch of the Vienna Academy for "schooling taste and the art of invention."
The present still-life was his reception piece submitted for the Academy in 1789. It shows that the painter was still firmly attached to late seventeenth-century principles of composition exemplified by Dutch artists such as Matthias Withoos. In Holland it was a known practice to integrate a decorative flower piece in the ambiance of a forest floor with birds and insects, towered over by stone monuments.
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