A bird of paradise, roses, tulips and other flowers in a gilt bronze vase on a stone ledge

Franz Xaver Petter was among the most important still-life painters of the Biedermeier period in Vienna. Petter, whose paintings were particularly popular with the Austrian nobility, studied under Johann Baptist Drechsler, professor of flower painting and director at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, and the leading Austrian flower painter of the previous generation. Petter's early work consisted almost exclusively of floral arrangements, to which he added fruit pieces and landscapes with flowers later in his career. Alongside those by Drechsler, Petter's paintings marked a continuation of the finely detailed style that had been promulgated by artists like Jan van Huysum roughly a century earlier.

The painting's earliest known owner was the Austrian tenor and entertainer Fritz Werner. Werner first performed in Louis-Aimé Maillart's opéra comique entitled Les dragons de Villars (The Dragoons of Villars) staged in 1892 at the Rudolfsheimer Volkstheater in Vienna. In the 1890s, he also had parts in performances in Cologne, Bonn and Russia, where in 1898 he participated in a tour led by the Austrian impresario Franz Jauner (1831-1900). In the early twentieth century, his career took him to Munich, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Berlin, Hamburg and Zürich. However, illness forced his retirement in 1926, shortly after the completion of the 1924-5 season at the Corso-Theater in Zürich.