Jean-Baptiste Madou (Belgian, 1796-1877)

Madou taught art to the children of the Belgian royal family and painted a series of decorative paintings for the chateau of Ciergnon for King Leopold.
The artist was skilled at depicting lively genre compositions. Using a confined interior, he would show heightened emotional responses from a collection of characters to a central action. Baron Gustave Springer, one of the leading industrialists in the heyday of Kaiser Franz Joseph, enjoyed staging amateur theatricals in Meidling, the great house he had built in the outskirts of Vienna. It is believed he commissioned Madou to record these tableaux's of himself and his friends.