Tina Blau

In 1882 a large landscape by Tina Blau was very nearly kept out of the big international exhibition at the Vienna Kunstlerhaus. The jury complained that its brightness would tear a hole in the wall, and only the intervention of Hans Makart, then the most celebrated painter in Vienna, got it hung. The picture, Spring in the Prater, shows the great Viennese park in fresh spring light, loosely and brightly painted. It made her famous almost overnight, and the next year won an honourable mention at the Paris Salon.

Blau was the daughter of a Viennese army doctor who, unusually for the time, encouraged his daughter to train as a painter. She studied in Munich and then in Vienna, for a while sharing a studio with the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler until the two fell out. She belonged to a Viennese current called mood Impressionism, which prized quiet, atmospheric landscapes.

As a woman she was shut out of the state academy, so in 1897 she helped found an art school for women in Vienna, the Frauenakademie, and taught there for nearly twenty years. Spring in the Prater still hangs in the Belvedere, in the same city whose park it shows.