Matthias Rudolf Toma

In 1834 Matthias Rudolf Toma painted Vienna from the Krapfenwaldl, a wooded hill of about 341 metres on the edge of the Vienna Woods. By 1806 the land there belonged to Prince Johann of Liechtenstein, who built a summer house on the top and laid out the grounds for the Viennese to enjoy. The small panel is now in the Belvedere.

Toma was the son of a Viennese butcher and studied at the Vienna Academy. In 1818 he moved to Schaffhausen in Switzerland, where he ran an art dealership and a lithography workshop, and he was among the first artists to use lithography, then a new printing technique, for landscapes. Back in Vienna from 1830, he painted landscapes, genre scenes and portraits, above all the countryside around the city and the meadows along the Danube. He became a close friend of Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, the leading Viennese painter of the Biedermeier years, and the influence was so strong that some of Toma's landscapes have been sold on the art market as Waldmüller's.