{"id":520721,"date":"2026-07-02T00:02:22","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T00:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/520721\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T00:02:22","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T00:02:22","slug":"waldmuller-landscapes-review-the-rule-breaking-radical-whose-delicate-fingers-drove-bourgeois-austria-wild-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/520721\/","title":{"rendered":"Waldm\u00fcller: Landscapes review \u2013 the rule-breaking radical whose \u2018delicate fingers\u2019 drove bourgeois Austria wild | Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ferdinand Georg Waldm\u00fcller (1793-1865) is regarded as one of the most important figures in 19th-century Austrian art; an influential and admired teacher, and a somewhat radical figure regarding the established Viennese Academy. He worked during the Biedermeier movement<\/a> which spanned the end of the Napoleonic wars until 1848 when various revolutions shook the ruling Habsburg empire and Austrian political elite. Biedermeier reflected the tastes and aspirations of a rising bourgeois society; terribly nice landscapes, genre scenes, floral and portrait pieces for the upwardly mobile drawing room. Within these genteel confines, Waldm\u00fcller intently focused on a more unflinching mode of depiction, concerned more with accuracy and integrity than the sentimentalising efforts of his peers, while also criticising the Academy\u2019s teaching methods and eventually in 1857 even calling for the abolition of all academies.<\/p>\n

Looming large \u2026 Self-portrait as a Young Man, 1828. Photograph: \u00a9 Belvedere, Vienna<\/p>\n

If this collection of relatively small, minutely detailed landscapes is representative of an impassioned, radical painter tearing up the rule-book, it is far from obvious from their tightly controlled, rather unimposing visual appearance. Each shows a vista of a specific location \u2013 The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia near Agrigento (1846), View of the Dachstein from the Sophien-Doppelblick near Ischl (1835) \u2013 accompanied by captions which systematically list topographical details of note, followed by some light technical analysis: for the latter, \u201cWaldm\u00fcller has distinguished the successive elements in the landscape with distinct changes in tonality, from the soft green of the valley to the blue-grey of the most distant mountains.\u201d In the show\u2019s only portrait, 1828\u2019s Self Portrait as a Young Man, which incidentally dwarfs everything else here in scale, the caption draws attention to \u201chis delicate fingers proclaiming his sensitivity and talent\u201d: delicacy and sensitivity are the operative descriptors for the entire show.<\/p>\n

It is noted that Waldm\u00fcller originally taught himself by copying 17th-century Dutch artists such as Jacob van Ruisdael<\/a>, abandoning this practice in favour of studying directly from nature. While Ruisdael conjures expressive landscapes of tangible mood and liveliness, Waldm\u00fcller effectively strips his landscapes of dramatic impact and overt personality in search of militant accuracy. He applies the ingredients of leaves, bark, grass and foliage to his compositions with the measured, squinty-eyed precision of a chef applying micro-garnish with a pair of tweezers.<\/p>\n

Unusual in itself is Waldm\u00fcller\u2019s use of the white rather than brown ground for his paintings. Applying oil paint in thin glazes on a white ground makes for brilliant shining colour; a practice also adopted in parallel by the pre-Raphaelites, whom he may have encountered during a trip to London in 1856. The pre-Raphaelites\u2019 efforts however are technicolour riots of eye-watering intensity fully in keeping with their slightly trippy and fantastical figures of myth and legend; again in confining himself to slavishly accurate reproduction of the trees around him, the visual impact for Waldm\u00fcller is comparatively dialled down to muted as-found-in-nature colours.<\/p>\n

Saccharine scene \u2026 Early Spring in the Vienna Woods, 1861. Photograph: \u00a9 Belvedere, Vienna<\/p>\n

It is difficult to fully comprehend Waldm\u00fcller\u2019s trailblazing status within the narrow parameters of landscape painting, and in isolation from contemporaneous contextual examples; what is the difference between these and the discipline of topographical or botanical paintings which serve primarily for academic record? The clue lies in a single landscape populated by a rather twee group of smiling children gathering violets in Early Spring in the Vienna Woods (1861), which gives a glimpse into the wider Biedermeier trend for sweet genre scenes with metaphorical content, here indicating the spring yet to come. With their saccharine presence, one can comparatively understand Waldm\u00fcller\u2019s desire to do away with such unserious fancy and focus on the \u201cunflinching honesty\u201d of the actual world.<\/p>\n

The choice to limit the UK\u2019s introduction to Waldm\u00fcller to landscapes may be attributed to the National Gallery\u2019s collaboration with the Belvedere in Vienna, which previously showed an expanded version of this group and loaned the majority of paintings. It is part of a concerted effort to plug the gaps in its holdings of German, Swiss and Austrian 19th-century Romantic paintings; after all, it has only one Caspar David Friedrich<\/a> in its permanent collection. This exhibition space has been dedicated to bringing such under-represented artists to its audience. Certainly, blockbusters showing Van Gogh have the most populist pulling power, but credit is due to the National for truly seeking to provide a fuller geographic and historical view of other artists and movements. To this end, this Waldm\u00fcller showcase is the art historical equivalent of eating your greens: it may not quicken the heartbeat but is nonetheless a healthy exercise forming a fully balanced palate.<\/p>\n

Waldm\u00fcller: Landscapes is at the National Gallery, London, from 2 July to 20 September<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ferdinand Georg Waldm\u00fcller (1793-1865) is regarded as one of the most important figures in 19th-century Austrian art; an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":520722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-520721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/520722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}