Prater Landscape (c. 1831): Art, History and Details

Prater Landscape (c. 1831) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Austrian, 1793–1865).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In this depiction of the Prater, a large public garden in Vienna, Austria, a man sits beside a tree in the left foreground. Brilliant sunlight floods into the park illuminating a multitude of trees, their leaves rendered with fine detail. Although celebrated for his portraits, Waldmüller also produced closely observed landscapes and often visited the Prater to paint the majestic oak trees. He was forced to retire from his position as a professor at the Vienna Academy for rejecting doctrines of idealized, moralizing art in favor of truth to nature based on direct observation.

Object facts

• Title: Prater Landscape
• Date: c. 1831
• Creator attribution: Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (Austrian, 1793–1865)
• Culture: Austria
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood panel
• Dimensions: Framed: 37.5 x 43.5 x 5.5 cm (14 3/4 x 17 1/8 x 2 3/16 in.); Unframed: 25 x 31 cm (9 13/16 x 12 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1983.155

A detail from the museum

Waldmüller, best remembered as one of the most important Austrian landscape painters, financed his early training by painting candy pictures and portrait miniatures, teaching children, and designing theater sets.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Feuchtmüller, Rupert. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793-1865: Leben, Schriften, Werke. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 1996.
• Feuchtmüller, Rupert. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller 1793-1865: Leben, Schriften, Werke. Wien: C. Brandstätter, 1996.
• Künstlerbund Hagen. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller: Jänner-März 1930, in den Räumen des Hagenbundes. [Wien]: [Kunstlerbund Hagen], 1930.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.