Austrian painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller held nature in high esteem. “Nature must be the only source and sum total of our study; there alone can be found the eternal truth and beauty, the expression of which must be the artist’s highest aim in every branch of the plastic arts,” he wrote in 1846.
Throughout his life, Waldmüller (1793–1865) closely studied nature. He believed that artists should concentrate their efforts on the “rendering of sunlight,” a practice he embraced as he studied, sketched, and painted the transient sunlight across Austria and Sicily, to name a couple of countries.
Toward Nature
At 14 years old, Waldmüller studied at the Academy of Art in Vienna, where he gained a strong foundation in the Old Master painting tradition. Soon after finishing at the academy he took commissions, mainly copying old master works. His teachers were German painter Hubert Maurer, who introduced classicism to the academy, and Italian painter Johann Baptist Lampi.Early in his career, Waldmüller painted portraits, which paid well and for which he became famous in the 1830s, before he focused on his love of genre and landscape paintings. In 1856, Waldmüller gained international success after an exhibition in Buckingham Palace, London.
Waldmüller’s landscape paintings in particular show his brilliant attention to detail. He painted his best landscapes between 1829 and 1843, when each summer he would visit the pristine alpine lakes and towering mountain peaks of the Salzkammergut, Austria’s lake district. Austrians often refer to one of the region’s lakes, Lake Altaussee, as an inkpot for writers and poets. In a similar vein, the entire Salzkammergut provides a breathtaking palette for painters.
Waldmüller, who loved to paint the high mountains, created the distant mountain and forest vistas just as detailed and clear as the foreground motifs. Waldmüller’s ability to render the distant details without any loss in definition defined his style.
Waldmüller’s sojourns to Salzkammergut gave him infinite opportunities to see how the sunlight caressed the land from dawn to dusk, and gave him endless plein-air painting practice. From 1834 on, he mainly painted landscapes of the region.
In “The Dachstein From Sophien-Doppelblick Near Ischl,” Waldmüller created a harmonious composition that leads the viewer deep into the Dachstein Mountains, a group of peaks in the Eastern Alps of Austria. In the foreground, a wooden fence directs viewers to the houses in the valley and to a meandering river on the right side of the painting. Waldmüller created the trees in the foreground with as much detail as the mountains and valley beyond, yet there is still a sense of space and depth of field—specialities of his work.
Waldmüller’s painting “View of the Dachstein With Lake Hallstatt Seen From the Hütteneckalm Near Ischl” shows an example of how he placed figures and buildings to give a sense of scale and depth. The tiny figures against the towering Dachstein Mountains put the vast, majestic scene into perspective, while allowing him to render the foreground and background objects in detail.
In addition to his landscapes, Waldmüller specialized in floral paintings. His 1843 still-life painting “Roses” shows how he applied his signature love of details to that genre, with its highly reflective objects such as the silver vase brimming with roses in various states of decay.
Capturing the Natural World and Human Nature
Waldmüller also had a talent for capturing human nature on canvas. He combined his love of the Austrian landscape with his keen insights into the human psyche to make successful genre paintings, often full of multiple figures. He painted these in the Biedermeier style of realist art that originated in Germany.
The Biedermeier style of art and architecture (around 1815–1848) grew during a period of European peace after the Napoleonic Wars. Austrian diplomat and statesman Klemens von Metternich’s leadership in Europe had brought political stability to the region. Urbanization and industrialization thrived and a new European middle class emerged, which was keen to collect and enjoy the arts.
In Austria, Biedermeier-style paintings contained no social or political commentary.
After the country’s years of instability, Biedermeier artists created realistic pious, sentimental paintings that generated warmth, good cheer, and a sense of belonging.
Waldmüller painted hope and the innate goodness of the human spirit in his genre paintings of pastoral scenes, people in poor houses, soup kitchens, and the like. Some of the paintings shows people in bleak circumstances, but even in these scenes, he showed the joy and the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
In “The Monastery Soup,” Waldmüller created a grand, harmonious work with multiple figures, reminiscent of the old masters’ compositions, such as Raphael’s large figurative works.
Waldmüller’s composition hints at a triangle, leading our attention to the bustling scene. Even though there’s much activity–jostling, laughter, prayer, and the general care of the children–each of the small figurative groupings, like each note in a great symphonic work, strengthens the overall composition of the painting. Even the monk in the wall painting seems to interact with the figures.
Many of Waldmüller’s works celebrate Austrian rural life and traditions, such as his endearing work “On Corpus Christi Morning,” wherein a group of jolly villagers ready themselves for the day. The painting centers on a group of girls dressed in white, with flower headdresses. A grandfather watches on the left side of the work, as a mother and baby and possibly a grandmother fuss over the girls’ dresses. A smartly dressed young boy in a blue sash holds a candle as he walks off to the right.
In his late work, Waldmüller combined genre and landscape subjects in his compositions, such as in “The Halted Pilgrimage.” It shows a group of pilgrims walking along a rocky hilltop pause to aid their companion, who has collapsed from exhaustion. Waldmüller painted the sick pilgrim and the figures close by at the highest point in the painting, perhaps to show the importance of the cross she holds and that the journey they’re making is not without sacrifice. He depicted the evening sunlight outlining the land like a halo, again emphasizing the pilgrims’ sacred plight.
Each brushstroke Waldmüller made captured the brilliance and delight of nature. His paintings have universal appeal; the heart of “true painting” does. French art critic Roger de Piles explained in his book “The Principles of Painting” in 1708: “True painting is such as not only surprises, but as it were, calls to us; and has so powerful an effect, that we cannot help coming near it, as if it had something to tell us.” Each of Waldmüller’s paintings tells us that he found the eternal truth and beauty he searched for, in the wilderness and in human nature itself.
