Neoclassicism and Romanticism

 

(Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Art Styles in 19th century - Art Map)



 

Moritz von Schwind



 

Moritz von Schwind
 

(b Vienna, 21 Jan 1804; d Niederpöcking, nr Munich, 8 Feb 1871). Austrian painter and illustrator.

He studied at the Akademie der Bildende Künste in Vienna (1821–3), where he was influenced by the Biedermeier genre painter Peter Krafft and the Nazarene painter Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld. He made copies after the Old Masters at the Belvedere in Vienna, exploring especially Durer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Raphael and Titian, which completed his early, largely autodidactic experience of art. His friendship with Franz Schubert, the poet and playwright Franz Grillparzer and the painters Ferdinand and Friedrich Olivier, as well as the cultural environment of Biedermeier Vienna in his years there between 1823 and 1828, shaped his spiritual development as a painter. His love of music inspired his later ‘symphonic’ compositions and flowing linear rhythms. Extensive reading of the work of Romantic writers such as Achim von Arnim, Clemens von Brentano, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Heinrich von Hagen and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm helped prepare his mature pictorial themes of fairytales, legends and sagas. He was unsuccessful as a painter and eked out a meagre livelihood by drawing naturalistic genre scenes for engravers, while occasionally selling a painting. Walk before the City Gate (1827; Bad Ischl, Dr Ernst Schwind priv. col.) illustrates his early painting style: it is a descriptive and highly detailed genre scene in which Schwind’s powers of observation are combined with Biedermeier charm and a graceful folksiness.

 

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