Marie Egner
1850–1940 · Austrian Empire, Austria–Hungary · Atmospheric impressionism, Impressionism
The story
In the 1880s Marie Egner worked alongside the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler at Plankenberg, a small castle near Neulengbach west of Vienna, where he gathered pupils to paint outdoors. With Tina Blau and Olga Wisinger-Florian she is counted among the painters of what Austrians call atmospheric impressionism, a quiet landscape painting of light, weather and ordinary corners of the countryside. Forest River with Bridge, in the Belvedere, dates from 1885, from those years with Schindler.
She had come a long way to get there. Born in 1850 in Bad Radkersburg in Styria, she took her first lessons in Graz and then studied in Düsseldorf. After leaving Schindler in 1887 she spent two years in England, and on her return she exhibited at the Vienna Künstlerhaus. She also opened a painting school for women, at a time when the Vienna Academy did not admit them, and ran it until poor health made her close it in 1910. Her work was shown in the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.
A large retrospective followed in 1926. After 1930 her eyesight failed badly and she withdrew from public life. She died in Vienna in 1940, aged 89.
