Bertha von Tarnóczy

In 1901, when the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts still admitted no women, a group of women painters in Vienna decided to exhibit together as the Eight Women Artists. Among them were the landscape painter Olga Wisinger-Florian and her friend Bertha von Tarnóczy, then in her mid-fifties.

Tarnóczy was born in Innsbruck in 1846 into a Hungarian noble family, and her uncle was the Archbishop of Salzburg, later a cardinal. For years she travelled with her father, a senior finance official, and she took her first painting lessons only around the age of 30, in Salzburg. From 1877 she studied in Munich, and in 1882 she was among the founders of the Munich women artists' association.

After moving to Vienna in 1886 she studied with the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler, and until 1919 she ran a painting school in Linz. She made study trips to Italy and Holland. The Belvedere holds her Alley in Malcesine from 1902, a street in the small town on the eastern shore of Lake Garda. She died in 1936 at Pörtschach on the Wörthersee, aged 89.