Tigress Suckling her Cubs

A Vienna porcelain plaque decorated with a polychrome scene featuring the outside of a rocky cavern, where a recumbent tigress turns from eating grapes to look at her three suckling cubs; in the distance on the left a wooded landscape. The oval porcelain dish has a gilded rim with an alternating tongue pattern.

After a painting attributed to Rubens, in the collection of the Comte de Lamberg in Vienna, in the early nineteenth century

Josef Nigg (1782-1863), the father of the painter Alois Nigg, studied under Johann Drechsler at the Academy in Vienna. From 1800 to 1843 he was employed as a flower painter at Vienna's porcelain factory, and from 1835 he also taught painting there. A large painting of flowers on a porcelain plaque thirty inches in height, was presented by Nigg on behalf of the Viennese factory, at the Great Exhibition of 1851.