Olga Wisinger-Florian

Olga Wisinger-Florian was training to become a concert pianist when her hand gave out. She had studied under Julius Epstein, a respected Vienna teacher, but an injury ended that path in her early thirties, and she turned in earnest to painting instead.

In the Vienna of the 1880s she fell in with the Stimmungsimpressionisten, the mood impressionists, and worked under the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler until the two fell out in 1884. Her early canvases are careful and full of detail. By the mid-1890s her brushwork had loosened into quick, bright strokes, and she became one of the most sought-after flower painters in the city, in the same years as the young Gustav Klimt.

She was an organiser as well. Wisinger-Florian campaigned for women artists in Vienna, who were still shut out of the main academy, pressing for the training and exhibition rights they were denied. Her flower pictures still come up regularly at auction in Vienna today.