Karl Karger

Look up at the ceilings of the Burgtheater, Vienna's court theatre on the Ring, and some of the paintings are by Karl Karger, made in 1885 and 1886. By then he was one of the decorators of the grand new buildings along the Ringstrasse, the boulevard laid out where the old city walls had stood. He had started in that world young, helping with cartoons for the murals of the new Opera under the painter Eduard Engerth.

In 1871 he left for Munich to study with Karl von Piloty, the city's leading history painter. The picture that still carries his name best was painted there in 1875 with a Viennese subject, a crowded platform at the new Northwestern Station, and the imperial gallery bought it the same year. It hangs today in the Belvedere. He also made copies at Versailles for Herrenchiemsee, the palace King Ludwig II of Bavaria was building.

From 1887 to 1908 Karger taught figurative decorative painting at the Vienna School of Applied Arts. The Austrian biographical dictionary notes that he held to the old academic taste long after modern art had overtaken it. His later commissions included ceiling paintings in the antiquities rooms of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and a fresco cycle for the Sacred Heart Church in Graz, painted between 1896 and 1904.