Lower Austrian Country Wedding
Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793 to 1865) · 1843
A village wedding spills across a sunlit square. The bride and groom stand in the centre in their best clothes while musicians play on a raised platform, children dart between the guests, an old woman is helped down the steps, and a young couple at the side seem more interested in each other than in the ceremony. Every face is a portrait and every gesture tells a small story. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller was the leading painter of the Biedermeier period in Vienna, the decades between the fall of Napoleon and the revolution of eighteen forty eight, when the middle classes turned away from politics and towards home, family and the countryside.
Waldmüller's great subject was light. Look at the way the sun falls across the cobbles and the whitewashed walls and how the shadows under the eaves are painted in cool blue rather than black. He argued with the academy about this; he wanted students to paint outdoors from nature rather than copy old masters, and he was eventually pushed out of his professorship for saying so. The buildings here are a composite of two villages south of Vienna, Perchtoldsdorf and Hinterbruhl, where he spent his summers.
Pictures like this were bought by bankers and civil servants who wanted an image of a wholesome rural Austria, and the painter knew it. But the observation is too sharp to be sentimental: the tipsy guest, the anxious mother, the dog underfoot. It came to the Belvedere with the state collection of nineteenth century Austrian art. If you enjoy it, the neighbouring rooms hold Waldmüller's landscapes of the Prater and the Vienna Woods, painted in the same clean light.
Did You Know? Waldmüller lost his professorship at the Vienna Academy for insisting that students should paint outdoors from nature instead of copying old masters.
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