Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller told his students to stop copying old masters and go look at the real thing, decades before that became ordinary advice. In the Vienna of the Biedermeier era, the calm, inward-looking years after the Napoleonic wars, that made him a problem.

Born in Vienna in 1793, he entered the Academy young, then pieced together a living as a portraitist, a drawing teacher for a count's children in Croatia, and a stage-set painter touring with his wife, a singer. He became a professor at the Vienna Academy in 1819, but his insistence that art must be built on close study of nature, painted outdoors in bright daylight, put him at odds with the school's official doctrine of ideal beauty. After he published his views on teaching, he was forced into retirement in 1857.

His landscapes and peasant scenes, crisp and sunlit down to each blade of grass, sold well to the Viennese middle class even while the Academy resisted him. He was welcomed back near the end and knighted in 1865, the year he died at Hinterbrühl, just outside Vienna.