Leisure hours 

Hans Zatzka painted this image of two women relaxing amongst foliage in an unknown year using oil on canvas. The painting’s coy sensuality and celebration of wealth are hallmarks of the artist’s wider output. Zatzka was an Austrian academic painter who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century, a time when the Austrian empire was in decline, but Vienna was a centre for both artistic experimentation and conservative traditionalism. His paintings are filled with classical and religious imagery and reflect the tastes of the upper-middle-class. They demonstrate an idealised vision of beauty and leisure that characterised much popular art of the period. Paintings like this were commissioned and collected by the well-to-do, and remind us of the role of the art market in shaping artistic production, especially with respect to the long history of depictions of women in art. To learn more, consider researching exhibition histories and the socio-economic context of art production in Vienna.