Joseph II. and His Court

Vienna, 1760s: Maria Theresa rules, her son waits, and the court's business is arranged by confessors, favorites and the Empress's chastity commission. Klara Mundt wrote as Luise Mühlbach and produced nearly three hundred volumes of this — history as gossip, delivered at speed, with real archives underneath. Nineteenth-century readers learned their European courts from her. Fifty-eight plates, among them Martin van Meytens and Anton Graff, carry the court's faces and festivities across two centuries, the visual counterpart to Mühlbach's gossipy Vienna.