Friedrich Amerling (Austrian, 1803–1887)

b. 1803 — d. 1887

Friedrich Amerling grew up in a poor working-class milieu and started his career illuminating maps and prints before attending the Vienna academy from 1815 until 1824. The following two years he studied at the academy in Prague, until his sojourn in London from 1827 through 1828. Amerling went to London primarily to meet the portraitist Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), whose fame had spread throughout Europe and whose work, together with that of Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), would form an important influence on Amerling's art. After a brief stay in Paris, during which Amerling met Vernet (q.v.), he went on to Rome. Back in Vienna he painted the life-size portrait of Emperor Franz I (1832/33, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which, despite its mixed reviews, estab-lished his reputation as the foremost portrait painter in Vienna. From then on he received many portrait commissions from the Viennese aristocracy and bourgeoisie (see Waldmüller, Countess Széchenyi, fig. 223b). In 1833 Amerling traveled to the Netherlands and, upon his return, visited the artistic centers of Munich and Düsseldorf, where he met the influential academy director Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow (1788-1862). Amerling's career reached its height from the 1830s through the 1850s. In the early 1840s he traveled to Rome where he worked with Leopold Pollak (1806-1880) and August Riedel (1799-1883), who influenced his work with their depictions of Italian beauties. Besides painting formal portraits, Amerling developed a painting category that remained close to portraiture but crossed over to a slightly sentimental type of genre or character painting, mostly depicting single women in coquettish poses. Although Amerling retained a certain popularity throughout his long career-he was knighted in 1879-he failed to adapt to changing artistic developments and was eventually overshadowed by artists such as Hans Makart (1840-1884).