WALDMÜLLER, Fedinand Georg

This painting is one of the two which remained unfinished at the death of the painter. The unfinished state of the painting documents Waldm�ller’s painting technique: he worked from the background landscape towards the front where the figures are seen.

Ferdinand Waldm�ller was the most important Austrian painter of the first half of the 19th century, and the leading representative of the Biedermeier style which emerged in Austria and Germany between 1815 (the year of the Congress of Vienna) and the Revolution of 1848. For Waldm�ller and the Biedermeier circle, art’s only purpose was the study of nature from an objective point of view, a conviction which led him to reject any idealizing or Romantic tendency. In addition to landscapes Waldm�ller also painted other subjects, all with an equally realistic approach, such as still-lifes, portraits and scenes of everyday life and customs.

The Vienna-based painter Ferdinand Georg Waldm�ller was a master of modest pleasures, a laureate of the status quo. But even he can surprise with the contrast between his skills for both hermetic still-life and plein air narrative. The first may be witnessed in his glittering Bouquet in an Attic Bell Crater. Seen against a startlingly neutral, dark background, the flowers are surrounded by early Victorian silver, ribbon, and jewelry.

Chubby-cheeked, happy children in their Sunday best are crowded at the window, watching with interest what is going on outside. With friendly smiles, the smaller of the two boys and the sister follow the movement of their brother’s arm as he points out of the picture with his index finger.

Merry peasant children, depicted without any suggestion of social criticism, were a popular motif when this painting was executed in 1853. Furthermore, the subject of frame pictures was a classical motif in European art. Waldm�ller’s version entitled Young Peasant Woman with Three Children at the Window, dating from 1840, is to be found at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich.

Waldm�ller’s landscapes represent his art at its most vivid. They show a remarkable clarity, particularly in the use of colour. Most of his landscapes depict sites in the Wienerwald - the woods around Vienna.

This spring scene was one that obsessed Waldm�ller in the last months of his life. He painted four versions of the subject.

Waldm�ller’s beginnings as an artist were characterised by intensive copying. His main interest was in Dutch landscape painting but he studied also religious paintings by Italian and Spanish artists. The present painting is a smaller copy of Jusepe de Ribera’s Martyrdom of St Andrew (Sz�pm�v�szeti M�zeum, Budapest)

Gy�rgy Ga�l (1783-1855) was a writer, pioneer in collecting Hungarian folktales. He worked in Vienna.

Waldm�ller was the most important Austrian painter of the Biedermeier period during the first half of the nineteenth century. Within his lifetime he established a reputation in America, and there was a major exhibition of his work in London in 1862. He was proficient in most aspects of painting - miniatures, landscape, portraits and genre. His career within the art establishment was successful, but not without controversy. Appointed Professor at the Academy in Vienna in 1829, he was an advocate of realist painting and of reform, which led to his temporary dismissal from the post from 1857-64. Nonetheless, Waldmiiller was an effective teacher, an influential theorist, and an immensely popular artist within Viennese society and at court. His success as a painter stemmed from his powers of observation, from his measured style and his wholly sympathetic treatment of subject matter. The accumulation and faithful recording of detail led to an idealism based on the subject matter itself, as opposed to one imposed upon it by an outside order, this being a vital distinction between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art.

Rustic genre was the last theme that Waldm�ller essayed. The subjects he chose extolled the moral virtues of rural life, or, as here, the joys of family life. The care taken over the rendering of garments, the still life and the surroundings is offset by the radiance of the figures’ expressions, reinforced by their gestures which create a circular composition of great tenderness. Waldm�ller was well-versed in the tradition of the Old Masters and the composition has affinities with several paintings by Raphael of the Holy Family - the Madonna Canigiani (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), the Madonna dell’Impannata (Florence, Palazzo Pitti), the Madonna of Francis I (Paris, Louvre) and the Madonna della Perla (Madrid, Prado). Waldm�ller’s homage to Raphael, however, is seen through the eyes of Correggio.

The landscapes around Salzburg were a favourite subject of German and Austrian painting, due to the almost Mediterranean beauty of many of these southerly locations. A characteristic aspect of Waldm�ller’s paintings is the depiction of mountains, natural features which assume particular prominence in this period. The gentle hills and the steep mountains here take up a large proportion of the canvas, reducing the area devoted to the sky.

There was a severe food shortage in 1816 and 1817, and this brought poverty and hence social problems that the authorities could no longer cope with. The birth rate of illegitimate children rose drastically because most of the people were not by law permitted to marry owing to their financial circumstances. The number of orphans and semi-orphans with no parents to care for them also rose drastically. Against that background the charm with which Waldm�ller has invested his children here must be seen as glossing over reality. Only the realists of the following generation dared to represent conditions in their truly fearful state.

The three-quarter portrait in vertical format of the young man is placed within a mountainous landscape.