Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller was the leading innovator for Austrian portrait, landscape, and genre painting of the romantic period, substantially contributing to a style that came to be known as Biedermeier.1 His earliest art lessons were in flower painting with porcelain painter Josef Zintler (d. 1826). From 1808 until 1813 Waldmüller attended the Vienna Academy at intervals, studying with Hubert Maurer (1738-1818) and Johann Baptist Lampi (1775-1837). The next two years Waldmüller engaged in painting portrait miniatures. He undoubtedly perfected his painting technique significantly by studying and copying the great masters in the major Viennese galleries well into the 1820s. Between 1825 and 1856 he traveled to Italy, as well as to France and England, in Paris being presented to Emperor Napoleon III and in London to Queen Victoria.
In 1827, the year before he painted Cleveland's Countess Zichy, Waldmüller had been introduced to the imperial court of Emperor Franz I and received the great honor of painting his portrait. In 1829 Prince Metternich appointed Waldmüller curator of the Lamberg Painting Gallery and professor of the Vienna Academy. However, his radical proposals to change academic teaching methods, by insisting that observation of and truth to nature were the only sources of art, would have ended his academic career in 1846 had Prince Metternich not intervened. Nevertheless, in 1855 his continued open criticism of academic procedures cost him his retirement, which, thanks to Emperor Franz I of Austria, was reinstated in 1863. Waldmüller's convincing honesty in portraying his sitters exactly as they were reflected the growing confidence of the bourgeoisie after the French revolutionary wars and Napoleon's final defeat in 1815. The artist's faithfulness to nature on the one hand, and his talent in portraying the elegance and luxury of his sitters' attire on the other, appealed to both the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.
1. The name Biedermeier was derived from a fictitious poet named Gottlieb Biedermaier (or Biedermeier) who was featured in the mid-nineteenth-century magazine Fliegende Blätter. "Bieder" describes a simple but honest and upstanding person, while "Meier" is a common German surname. The style pervaded all of Europe, but particularly Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, centering mainly in cities with active academies. See also Amerling, The Young Eastern Woman, no. 4.
