waldmuller's "dog by basket of grapes"

courtesy the-athaneum.org. public domain

Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller (Austrian, 1793-1895) was one of the leading painters of the Biedemeier period, a stylistic era in Germanic and central Europe in which domestic subjects and homely comforts took precedence.  That's a big blanket statement, as the Biedermeier period had much of its genesis in political and cultural repression and resulted in a fair number of artists and thinkers decamping for freer air in other countries, but you can read about that a bit here.  Does that mean Waldmuller bought into repression?  No - in fact, he spent five years of his late career at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in forced retirement because his educational ideas didn't toe their lines.
Waldmuller believed that studying nature and working in plein-air made for good painting. As you can see, he was a master of this attack, and not least in the avid face of this mighty little watchguy in 1835's A Dog by a Basket of Grapes in a Landscape.