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Oct 27, 2008

Prater Landscape

c. 1831

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

(Austrian, 1793–1865)

Austria, 19th century

Oil on wood panel

Framed: 37.5 x 43.5 x 5.5 cm (14 3/4 x 17 1/8 x 2 3/16 in.); Unframed: 25 x 31 cm (9 13/16 x 12 3/16 in.)

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund 1983.155

Location

not on view

Did you know?

Waldmüller, best remembered as one of the most important Austrian landscape painters, financed his early training by painting candy pictures and portrait miniatures, teaching children, and designing theater sets.

Description

In this depiction of the Prater, a large public garden in Vienna, Austria, a man sits beside a tree in the left foreground. Brilliant sunlight floods into the park illuminating a multitude of trees, their leaves rendered with fine detail. Although celebrated for his portraits, Waldmüller also produced closely observed landscapes and often visited the Prater to paint the majestic oak trees. He was forced to retire from his position as a professor at the Vienna Academy for rejecting doctrines of idealized, moralizing art in favor of truth to nature based on direct observation.

Artist biography

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller was the leading innovator for Austrian portrait, landscape, and genre painting of the romantic period, substantially contributing to a style that came to be known as Biedermeier.1 His earliest art lessons were in flower painting with porcelain painter Josef Zintler (d. 1826). From 1808 until 1813 Waldmüller attended the Vienna Academy at intervals, studying with Hubert Maurer (1738-1818) and Johann Baptist Lampi (1775-1837). The next two years Waldmüller engaged in painting portrait miniatures. He undoubtedly perfected his painting technique significantly by studying and copying the great masters in the major Viennese galleries well into the 1820s. Between 1825 and 1856 he traveled to Italy, as well as to France and England, in Paris being presented to Emperor Napoleon III and in London to Queen Victoria. In 1827, the year before he painted Cleveland's Countess Zichy, Waldmüller had been introduced to the imperial court of Emperor Franz I and received the great honor of painting his portrait. In 1829 Prince Metternich appointed Waldmüller curator of the Lamberg Painting Gallery and professor of the Vienna Academy. However, his radical proposals to change academic teaching methods, by insisting that observation of and truth to nature were the only sources of art, would have ended his academic career in 1846 had Prince Metternich not intervened. Nevertheless, in 1855 his continued open criticism of academic procedures cost him his retirement, which, thanks to Emperor Franz I of Austria, was reinstated in 1863. Waldmüller's convincing honesty in portraying his sitters exactly as they were reflected the growing confidence of the bourgeoisie after the French revolutionary wars and Napoleon's final defeat in 1815. The artist's faithfulness to nature on the one hand, and his talent in portraying the elegance and luxury of his sitters' attire on the other, appealed to both the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. 1. The name Biedermeier was derived from a fictitious poet named Gottlieb Biedermaier (or Biedermeier) who was featured in the mid-nineteenth-century magazine Fliegende Blätter. "Bieder" describes a simple but honest and upstanding person, while "Meier" is a common German surname. The style pervaded all of Europe, but particularly Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, centering mainly in cities with active academies. See also Amerling, The Young Eastern Woman, no. 4.

Provenance

1865?

Herr von Beer ¹

(Kunsthandlung Arnot, Vienna)

By 1930

Private collection, Vienna ²

Until 1937

Fritz Nathan, sold to Dr. Tobler ³

1937-

Dr. Tobler ⁴

By 1943 - by 1945

Baron Robert von Hirsch [1883-1977], Basel, sold to Dr. Fritz Nathan ⁵

By 1945

Dr. Fritz Nathan, St. Gallen, sold to a Swiss private collector ⁶

By 1957

Private collection, Zurich ⁷

Until 1983

(Galerie Nathan, Zürich, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art)

1983-

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Provenance Footnotes

¹Rupert Feuchtmüller’s Waldmüller catalogue raisonné is the only known source for the inclusion in the provenance of Herr von Beer, about whom further details are unknown. The source for his ownership of the Waldmüller in 1865 is also unknown. It is also possible that “Herr von Beer” should in fact be “Herr von Behr,” as there are very few references to anyone by the name of “Herr von Beer.” An obscure reference to one Herr von Beer during the years 1870-74 appears in the 1906 Memoirs of Prince Chlowig of Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, vol. 2, p. 58: “When the Bavarians marched past with the other picked troops, my neighbor, Herr von Beer, was so moved that he thanked me heartily for my share in the arrangement.” A perhaps more relevant reference is in Francis Turner Palgrave’s Official Catalogue of the Fine Art Department, which accompanied the International Exhibition in London of 1862, which lists among the architectural designs of “E. Knoblauch,” a Prussian architect (possibly Carl Heinrich Eduard Knoblauch), the “Residence of Herr von Behr, Wilhelmsplatz, Berlin” (p. 182).

²Künstlerbund Hagen. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller: Jänner-März 1930, in den Räumen des Hagenbundes. [Wien]: [Kunstlerbund Hagen], 1930.

³According to Johannes Nathan, Fritz Nathan was frequently in Vienna in the 1930s and may very well have purchased the painting there prior to 1937.

⁴The archives of Galerie Nathan show that they sold the painting to one Dr. Tobler in 1937. Johannes Nathan suggested that Fritz Nathan may have sold the painting to Robert von Hirsch on behalf of Dr. Tobler, although their records, which are incomplete, do not provide confirmation one way or the other. "Dr. Tobler" is handwritten on the "Sammlung Robert von Hirsch, Basel" label on the back of the painting.

⁵German industrialist von Hirsch lent the Waldmüller to an exhibition of nineteenth-century artworks at the Basel Kunsthalle in 1943.

⁶Peter Nathan recalled that his father, dealer Fritz Nathan, had purchased the painting from von Hirsch during the war.

⁷A 1953 Waldmüller exhibition at the Salzburg Residenz and Bruno Grimschitz’s 1957 Waldmüller monograph both give the painting's current owner as a Zurich private collector, likely the Swiss collector to whom Fritz Nathan had sold it previously.

Citations

Feuchtmüller, Rupert. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793-1865: Leben, Schriften, Werke. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 1996.

Künstlerbund Hagen. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller: Jänner-März 1930, in den Räumen des Hagenbundes. [Wien]: [Kunstlerbund Hagen], 1930.

Johannes Nathan, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, Feb. 24, 2015, in CMA curatorial file.

Johannes Nathan, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, Feb. 26, 2015, in CMA curatorial file.

Johannes Nathan, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, Feb. 24, 2015, in CMA curatorial file.

Tania Lehmann, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, Feb. 18, 2015, in CMA curatorial file.

Feuchtmüller, Rupert. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793-1865: Leben, Schriften, Werke. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 1996.

Galerie Nathan, invoice, Nov. 30, 1983, in CMA curatorial file.

Sören Schmeling, email to Victoria Sears Goldman, March 29, 2016, in CMA curatorial file.

Feuchtmüller, Rupert. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793-1865: Leben, Schriften, Werke. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 1996.

Peter Nathan, letter to Sherman Lee, May 27, 1983, in CMA curatorial file.

Galerie Nathan, invoice, Nov. 30, 1983, in CMA curatorial file.

Feuchtmüller, Rupert. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793-1865: Leben, Schriften, Werke. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 1996.

Grimschitz, Bruno. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Salzburg: Galerie Welz, 1957.

Peter Nathan, letter to Sherman Lee, May 27, 1983, in CMA curatorial file.

Galerie Nathan, invoice, Nov. 30, 1983, in CMA curatorial file.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, 1793-1865. [Katalog zur Gedächtnis-Ausstellung Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Salzburg, Residenz, 15. Juni bis 15. September 1953. Salzburg: Galerie Welz, 1953.

Galerie Nathan, invoice, Nov. 30, 1983, in CMA curatorial file.

Grimschitz, Bruno. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller. Salzburg, Austria: Galerie Welz, 1957. Reproduced: pl. 5

Lurie, Ann Tzeutschler. “Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in the Cleveland Museum of Art: Portrait of Crescentia, Countess Zichy (later Countess Széchenyi) with a Parrot and a Camellia in a Mountainous Landscape.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 81, no. 1 (1994): 3-17. Mentioned: p. 3, 15 www.jstor.org

Lurie, Ann Tzeutschler. “Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller in the Cleveland Museum of Art: Prater Landscape.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 81, no. 1 (1994): 18-23. Reproduced: p. 18, 21; Mentioned: p. 18-23 www.jstor.org

Argencourt, Louise d', and Roger Diederen. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 4. European Paintings of the 19th Century. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974. Mentioned and reproduced: P. 639-640, Vol. II, no. 224

Robinson, William. “Nature Transformed.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 61, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 27. Reproduced and Mentioned: P. 27.

Exhibition history

Vienna, Oesterreichischer Kunstverein. Katalog der Ausstellung von Kunstwerken des Malers und Professors der k. k. Akademie, Ferdinand G. Waldmüller. 169. Ausstellung (1865), no. 67.

Vienna, Hagenbund. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1930), no. 32, Praterbäume, Privatbesitz Wien (repr.).

Basel, Kunsthalle. Kunstwerke des 19. Jahrhunderts aus Basler Privatbesitz (1943), no. 66, Praterlandschaft.

Salzburg, Residenz. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793-1865 (1953), no. 36, Praterbäume (early 1830s), private collection, Switzerland.

Winterthur, Kunstmuseum. Europäische Meister 1790-1910 (1955), no. 212, Praterbäume, Schweizer Privatbesitz.

The Year in Review for 1983. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 22-April 8, 1984).

Stories From Storage. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 7-May 16, 2021).

Cite this page

{{cite web|title=Prater Landscape|url=https://clevelandart.org/art/1983.155|author=Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller|year=c. 1831|access-date=04 December 2023|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

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Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

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Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

Provenance Footnotes

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