Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793-1865), a radical figure in 19th-century Austrian art, is the subject of a focused exhibition at the National Gallery, London, from 2 July to 20 September. The show presents his meticulously detailed landscapes, which broke from the sentimental conventions of the Biedermeier movement. Waldmüller criticized the Viennese Academy's teaching methods and even called for the abolition of all academies in 1857.
Precision Over Sentiment
The exhibition features small, minutely detailed landscapes such as The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia near Agrigento (1846) and View of the Dachstein from the Sophien-Doppelblick near Ischl (1835). Captions list topographical details and technical analysis, noting for the latter that “Waldmüller 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.” The only portrait, Self Portrait as a Young Man (1828), dwarfs the landscapes in scale, with its caption highlighting “his delicate fingers proclaiming his sensitivity and talent.”
Technique and Influence
Waldmüller initially copied 17th-century Dutch artists like Jacob van Ruisdael but later studied directly from nature. Unlike Ruisdael's expressive landscapes, Waldmüller strips his work of dramatic impact in pursuit of militant accuracy. He applied leaves, bark, and grass with the precision of a chef using tweezers. Unusually, he used a white ground instead of brown, applying thin glazes for brilliant colour—a practice adopted by the Pre-Raphaelites, whom he may have encountered during a 1856 trip to London. However, his colours remain muted compared to the Pre-Raphaelites' intensity.
Context and Comparison
The exhibition includes Early Spring in the Vienna Woods (1861), featuring a group of children gathering violets—a saccharine scene typical of Biedermeier genre painting. This highlights Waldmüller's desire to abandon such sentimentality for “unflinching honesty” in depicting nature. The show, a collaboration with the Belvedere in Vienna, aims to fill gaps in the National Gallery's holdings of German, Swiss, and Austrian 19th-century Romantic paintings. The gallery has only one Caspar David Friedrich in its permanent collection.
While not a blockbuster like Van Gogh exhibitions, this showcase provides a fuller geographic and historical view of under-represented artists. As the review notes, “this Waldmüller showcase is the art historical equivalent of eating your greens: it may not quicken the heartbeat but is nonetheless a healthy exercise.”
