WALDMÜLLER, Fedinand Georg

One of the leading Austrian painters of 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. period. He studied at the Vienna Academy. He lived in Bratislava, then worked as a teacher of art in the house of Count Gyulay. After his return to Vienna, he copied pictures of old masters, and painted portraits, genre subjects, and still-life, but is perhaps best known for his landscapes, which in their loving attention to detail illustrate his belief that the close study of nature should be the basis of painting. He became the most significant representative of Biedermeier: he was second to none in depicting nature in delicate colours. His many genreGLOSSARYIn a broad sense, the term is used to mean a particular branch or category of art; landscape and portraiture, for example, are genres of painting, and the essay and the short story are genres of literature.-pictures are also significant.

He became a teacher of the Vienna Academy. However, his views were in opposition to the official doctrines of ideal art promulgated by the Vienna Academy, and after he had published his works on art education, he was forced to retire in 1857. He was rehabilitated in 1863.