Wilhelm Koller, Austrian
“Okay, Hugh — When I Shout ‘Action!,’ Just Read From the Cue Card: ‘I Don’t Always Paint Wall Murals, But When I Do, I Prefer Glidden High Endurance Interior Paints and Primers,'” 1870
Oil on wood
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Info about the artist can be found here (Google translated), and here, perhaps in addition to the artist's Google translated German Wikipedia page.
Emperor Maximilian to Albrecht Dürer:
/// “I demand you erase this cartoon.
It lampoons me as old Pantaloon,
(a buffoon picayune,)
and you further impugn
how I speak with that ribald balloon.”
/// Dürer stood high up, painting a wall,
and his Emperor feared he might fall.
“Grab that ladder and hold,”
a near noble was told.
He refused, showing hubris and gall.
/// Maximilian walked over to do
what the noble declined, for he knew,
“I can change peasants’ fate
into noblemen great,
but I can’t make an artist of you!”
This painting, “Albrecht Dürer is Visited by Emperor Maximilian at Work,” is said to illustrate an anecdote of the time in which the Holy Roman Emperor praised his famous court artist who was painting a mural. Seeing Dürer teetering high up on a dangerously rickety ladder, Maximilian asked a nobleman standing beneath to steady it. The man refused the task as being beneath his station. So the Emperor walked over and held the ladder himself, and said, “I can make a noble out of a peasant any day, but I cannot make an artist like Dürer out of a noble.”