Michael Neder

In 1836 Michael Neder painted hussars, soldiers of the light cavalry, billeted among civilians, and a girl at her morning toilette. Both pictures are now in the Belvedere, and both show what he painted all his life, the everyday people of the villages on the edge of Vienna, without sentiment and without a moral.

He came from a family of shoemakers in Oberdöbling, then a village outside the city, and learned his father's trade. As a boy he was noticed drawing in the street and went on to study at the Vienna Academy for about seven years. Even so, he lost confidence, and in 1831 he went back to making shoes. Around 1834 the miniature painter Moritz Daffinger and the animal painter Friedrich Gauermann persuaded him to return to painting, and he stayed with it for good. The Viennese knew him as the shoemaker painter.

His subjects were coachmen, butchers, servants, taverns and country fairs. He flattened and simplified his figures, and in The Return of the Herd, painted in 1844, the Belvedere saw traits that would find a modern equivalent only in the realism of the interwar years. He never earned much and died poor in 1882. In 2013 the Belvedere gave him his first large museum exhibition, with about 60 works, under the title Without Compromises.