The Academy and the Russian Court Vienna, 1804. A child is born into a family where art lingers in the periphery; his grandfather had once traveled from Regensburg to settle in this city. His mother, an enthusiast of the arts, recognizes a spark in him early on. By 1817, the boy enters the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. He sits at the feet of Johann Baptist Lampi and Anton Petter, absorbing the rigors of drawing and history painting. The air in the studio is thick with the discipline of the old masters. A shift occurs in 1819. A study trip through Switzerland and Germany pulls his gaze away f…