Friedrich Gauermann
(Scheuchenstein, Miesenbach/Lower Austria 1807 – Vienna 1862)
Friedrich Gauermann was born in 1807 as the third son of Jakob and Rosina Gauermann in Scheuchenstein (today Miesenbach) in Lower Austria. His father Jakob, who came from a family of carpenters, worked hard and talented to become Archduke Johann's chamber painter.
Jakob Gauermann was also an excellent teacher and trained his sons in art. Friedrich Gauermann dealt with academic compositional principles and studied the old Dutch. The direct engagement with the nature of the Alps soon made Friedrich Gauermann an independent artist. At the age of 17, in 1824, Friedrich got the great opportunity to show his works in the academy exhibition in Vienna, although he was not a student there at the time.
Friedrich Gauermann lived in the country in summer, took part in courses at the academy in winter and, from 1825, went on extensive study trips to the Bavarian and Austrian Alps almost every year. His preferred painting motifs were animal pieces, pure landscapes, and scenes from folk life. From 1830, themes from rural life, alpine pasture scenes as well as depictions of hunting and animal combat and stable interior pictures found their way into Gauermann's work. In doing so, the painter considered the taste of the time.
In 1836 Friedrich Gauermann became a member of the Vienna Academy and in 1848 the City of Vienna made him an honorary citizen. In 1855 he received a prize for his art in Paris. In England he had earned an excellent reputation as an animal painter and the buyers of his pictures included the imperial family, the high nobility, and the bourgeoisie. Friedrich Gauermann's paintings went to Germany, France, England, Russia, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary and Italy.
With artist colleagues such as Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Gauermann often painted in front of the same scenes on hikes to alpine motifs. Among these artists, Gauermann was the most imaginative and effective who could identify with living nature. One of his painter’s colleagues said: “It may happen that one of us paints a landscape and another a few animals very efficiently, yes masterfully, but if the whole thing is supposed to live together properly, nobody else than our Gauermann paints it."
Gauermann studied the individual details, such as figures, animals, trees, the course of the stream and mountains from nature. The artistic image idea, abstracted from nature, can only be recognized in the genre content - heightened by attached lights that set accents and lines and shadows that convey the romantic and often emotionally exaggerated experience of the landscape.
Friedrich Gauermann lost his cheerful mood after the death of his daughter. Together with his sickness, this contributed to his death in 1862 at the age of 55 in his studio on the Laimgrube. He was buried in his hometown Scheuchenstein (Miesenbach).