Austrian painter active in Brazil. He studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where from the start he was interested in recording landscape, especially in watercolour. As a protégé of Chancellor Metternich he was appointed artist to the Austrian scientific mission that left for Brazil in 1817 accompanying Dona Leopoldine, the Archduchess of Austria and the Imperial Brazilian princess. During his ten-month stay in Brazil, spent mainly in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and in trips between the two cities, he depicted landscapes, people, architecture, everyday implements and the flora and fauna of the region in nearly 800 watercolours and drawings (Vienna, Bib. Akad. Bild. Kst.). Careful detail outweighs the intrusion of a certain exoticism in these works, as can be seen, for example, in Guanabara Bay (1817; São Paulo, Mus. A.). On his return to Austria, and after a sightseeing and study trip through Italy, he became professor of landscape painting in the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna between 1836 and 1851.

-From Grove Dictionary of Art