LOOS, Friedrich

Austrian painter, etcher and lithographer, working in the BiedermeierGLOSSARYTerm applied to a style characteristic of much German and Austrian art and interior decoration in the period roughly between the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) and the Year of Revolutions (1848). The name derives from a fictional character called Gottlieb Biedermaier (sic) from the journal Fliegende Elssner (Flying Leaves), who personified the solid yet philistine qualities of the bourgeois middle classes, and the art to which he lent his name eschewed flights of the imagination in favour of sobriety, domesticity, and often sentimentality. There were, as is to be expected, no major painters associated with Biedermeier but many excellent practitioners, such as Waldmüller. The term is sometimes extended to cover the work of artists in other countries. style. Between 1813 and 1816/21, he studied at the Vienna Academy with Joseph Mössmer (1780-1845) and Joseph Rebell. He also went on study tours through the Austrian Alpine regions. Thomas Ender, Johann Fischbach, Friedrich Gauermann (1807-1862), and Johann Michael Sattler (1786-1847) were fellow-students of the artist. Loos applied himself to the study of nature and of 17th-century landscape painting.

Between 1826 and 1835, he lived in Salzburg, where he executed the landscape part of Johann Michael Sattler's "Grand Panorama of the City of Salzburg". With the landscapes he painted in Salzburg, Loos made a major contribution to the development of Austrian landscape painting. From 1835 to 1836 he lived in Vienna, and as of 1846 he sojourned in Rome. He then moved to Kiel, where he worked as a drawing teacher at the university as of 1863 and where he also died on 9 May 1890. In his pictures he emphasized light and colour in order to loosen up his painting, as well as to harmonize and unite the details.