The Lavish Light of Everyday

Der Notverkauf by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, oil on canvas (1859) - Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart

Ferdinand George Waldmüller was fascinated by light. His remarkable study Elm Trees in the Prater is a wild array of color captured on the bark and leaves radiating in the bright sunlight setting off shadows that outline the angular, contortions of the trees, a rush of life and energy. Waldmüller was breaking new ground in his time, moving away from the Dutch traditions of using light as a dramatic effect, and instead studied how light can transform color.

This insight, which made Waldmüller (1793 – 1865) one of Austria’s most significant 19th century artists, is amply in evidence at the current exhibition at the Lower Belvedere. The comprehensive showing presents 120 paintings (of the artist’s total known œuvre of over 1,200) brought to Vienna from museums, including from the Principality of Liechtenstein and the Louvre in Paris, and private collections from all over Europe. Many have never been shown before in public.

A room full of Waldmüllers is a cheerful place aglow with bright colors, pristine polished surfaces and romanticized, tranquil scenes typical of the early 19th century Biedermeier period. Here are the bucolic landscapes, the noble portraiture, genre paintings and still lifes that reflect a largely peacefully and prosperous era, already growing nostalgic for the serenity of the countryside losing ground to industrialization.

However, in spite of these typical stylistic features, Waldmüller was not a conventional Biedermaier artist. He preferred to paint en plein air, in natural light, rather than following the standard practice of only producing art in his studio. He also rejected the contemporary practice of copying the styles and techniques of respected masters.

Waldmüller’s hyper-reality: elm trees in his Praterlandschaft series - Photo courtesy of the Belvedere

The Belvedere exhibition emphasizes the uncanny, almost hyperrealism in some of these pieces. The light falling on a hand or a bunch of grapes seems to release the color and give the textures a dynamic energy, particularly evident in the genre paintings – representations of scenes or events from everyday life – like On Corpus Christi Morning (Am Fronleichnamsmorgen) painted in 1857. These ideas would come to inspire Austrian artists of later Secession and Impressionist movements.

Waldmüller depicted what he saw in the most accurate and lifelike manner possible, a goal he associated with a search for the truth.

“The task of every work of art is never ever to be tackled in any other way than the way of truth,” Waldmüller wrote. His extraordinary realism is most evident in the series of park studies in Vienna. In the Elm Trees in the Prater from 1831, every color and shade bursts from the canvas, every individual tree distinguishable, as unique as a human face.

By today’s standards these paintings hardly seem unembellished. To us they feel romanticized: One called The Forced Sale dating from 1857 portrays a troubling scene of a family at the end of its rope, selling its last calf. This is a family in poverty, yet all the characters are decently dressed in sturdy farm clothes, putting on brave faces. The sun splashes across a plaster wall, the blush glows from a cheek, the folds of a peasant shirt look soft enough to touch. Even the muted tones of the farm yard or the ruts and mud of the country road are textured and alive.

In spite of the subject, it is a beautiful painting, a romanticized view of poverty intended to evoke the viewer’s sympathy without being too critical of these appalling conditions. However, Waldmüller’s work has to be understood within its historic context, when even to address the struggles and hardships of lower levels of society was radical enough.

Unfortunately, this exhibition does too little to make this clear. Most of Waldmüller’s work on display here was painted during the Metternich era, a time of censorship and political repression. His policies were especially detrimental to the less fortunate and culminated in the revolution of 1848 – all of which had a great impact on Waldmüller’s art yet have completely been ignored by this exhibition; it prefers to focus on Waldmüller’s aesthetic appeal.

While his works were bought by Buckingham Palace in London and Emperor Napoleon III in France, he was also widely criticized for not conforming to the traditional principles of the Biedermeier official canon of the day. In hindsight, Waldmüller’s work and technique were ground-breaking for his time as he strived for realistic depictions of things as he saw them instead of being confined to the walls of his studio. Waldmüller left his mark in the art world as one of the earliest artists to question the traditional artistic norms and principles of his time and thereby gave food for thought for later generations of artists.