The Austrian painter Johann Hamza (1850-1927) is amongst the most gifted 19th Century genre artists, who showed a profound fascination with pictures set in the later eighteenth century.
As M. Poltimore and P. Hook commented, 'The eighteenth century assumed an almost mythic significance for bourgeois Europe of a hundred years later.
The Goncourt rediscovered it and elevated it into an Arcadia on a par with antiquity.