Franziska Zach

In the summer of 1930 the City of Vienna gave Franziska Zach its art prize for the pictures she had painted in Paris. By December she was dead at 30, shortly before what would have been her first solo exhibition in France. Her biographers link the stomach illness that killed her to poverty and poor food.

She was the daughter of a railway worker from Losenstein, near Steyr in Upper Austria, and studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts from 1917, among others with the architect Oskar Strnad. In 1923 and 1924 she trained in enamel under Josef Hoffmann, co-founder of the Wiener Werkstätte, and afterwards fired her own enamel vessels and pictures in a kiln of her own.

As a painter she belonged to Wiener Frauenkunst, an association of women artists, and showed with the Hagenbund, one of Vienna's progressive exhibiting societies, first as a guest and then as an associate member. Trips to the south of France and to England in 1927 and 1928 brought her a patron who paid for further journeys, to Ireland and to Paris, where she took a studio in 1930. The Belvedere's Corsican Landscape dates from 1928, the first of those travelling years.

After her death she was largely forgotten, until the Belvedere's large Hagenbund exhibition in 2014 brought her back into view, and in 2019 her work hung in the museum's show City of Women, on women artists in Vienna from 1900 to 1938.