Amongst those who had looked forward with particular expectancy to the opening of the great World Exhibition that was held in Vienna in the autumn of 1873 was the painter Anselm Feuerbach. He had, the previous year, accepted the offer of an appointment as director of the historical class about to be formed in the Imperial Academy of Plastic Arts of that city, but had begged for a year's leave of absence in Rome before entering on his new duties, in order that he might finish two great pictures, 'The Battle of the Amazons' and 'The Second Symposium,' the exhibition of which he conceived likely to establish his fame and to secure him an authoritative position on taking up his residence in Austria. The nearly finished pictures were sent to Vienna in March or April, and Feuerbach followed them in May, 1873, but it turned out that they could not be hung in the Exhibition gallery on account of their great size. The painter determined, therefore, to exhibit them one after the other in the 'Künstler-Haus,' and, in order to secure the advantage of association in the mind of the public with so favourite a celebrity of Vienna as Brahms had at this time become, he requested the master to sit to him on his return in October in order that his portrait might be exhibited with the other pictures. Feuerbach was a small man of ultra-refined appearance and manners, and a countenance of rather melancholy expression that had evidently been of striking beauty in his youth. He was accustomed to be made much of by ladies, was extremely sensitive and self-centred, and inordinately vain, and had confidently persuaded himself that his pictures were to achieve an instant and overwhelming success. 'My pictures are splendid and all but finished,' he wrote to his mother on October 2; 'why should I feel a moment's anxiety since I have eminent power in my hands; genius and position.... The Symposium also is quite exquisite, I may say so now as I have seen the Vatican.'[46]