The Pancake Seller (Das Krapfenweib)

This painting was intended to hang in the best room of a middle-class apartment in Vienna. The emerging Austrian bourgeoisie at the end of the 18^th century repeated the artistic preferences of the first great middle-class society, that of the Dutch Netherlands of the 17^th century. Particularly popular among genre subjects were the so-called "street cries" of the city, representations of poor, wandering peddlers.

The muted color and dark tonality of the painting, the simple, commonplace setting, and realistic figure types could point to a score of Dutch artists of the previous century. But the blond child in the foreground—protecting his cake from an aggressive dog—is taken directly, but in reverse, from a 1635 etching by Rembrandt.