The 300th birthday of Empress Maria Theresia provides an opportunity to examine her outstanding interest in the fine arts. At the invitation of the reforming monarch a large number of painters, sculptors and other artists in Austria and abroad found a wealth of work opportunities. Correspondingly, this era has left its mark on the countries of the former Habsburg monarchy to this day.

With their overwhelming wealth of forms, prints of designs of historic ornaments are a source of boundless inspiration for graphic artists and designers. They also allow collectors and art historians to reliably date works and classify styles. This cornucopia of design, published here for the first time in English, contains the finest images from the famous, hitherto out-of-print, and seminal work by Rudolf Berliner.

The outstanding painting A Girl Reading by Camille Corot (1796–1875) is placed in the context of a selection of Corot’s paintings and drawings providing a key to his creative output in the genre of figure painting.