Waldmüller: Landscapes

2 July – 20 September 2026
The National Gallery
The H J Hyams Room (Room 1), Admission free

In summer 2026 the National Gallery will present the first ever UK exhibition of paintings by the Austrian 19th-century artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865). 

Waldmüller: Landscapes 2 July – 20 September 2026, additionally the first devoted solely to his work as a landscapist, is a collaboration between the National Gallery and the Belvedere Museum, Vienna, which is lending most of the works on display.  

Waldmüller is one of the most important figures in Austrian 19th-century art, significant for his work both as an artist and as an influential teacher. As well as landscapes, he painted portraits, genre pictures and still lifes (notably flowers and fruit), all characterised by his absolute commitment to truth.

He was one of the leading artists of Austria’s Biedermeier period, which roughly spanned the Congress of Vienna in 1815 (which aimed to reshape Europe’s borders following the Napoleonic Wars) to 1848, the year of revolutions throughout Europe, including revolts against the Habsburg monarchy and the political leaders within Austria itself. The period was characterised by both a burgeoning urban middle class, whose taste and financial power shaped developments in music, theatre and art, and an increasing popularity in paintings focusing on private domestic life. 

Co-curator Sarah Herring says: ‘While Waldmüller is considered a Biedermeier artist his work, along with other artists of the period, can be both moralising and unflinchingly honest.’
 
Having enrolled at the Academy in Vienna in 1807, Waldmüller received a traditionally academic education in art – such as drawing after the Antique. He taught himself landscape painting by copying Dutch 17th-century landscapes, particularly those by Jacob van Ruisdael and Meindert Hobbema, and this was a genre which became increasingly important to him from the 1820s onwards. 

Waldmüller’s attention to detail, photographic clarity and equal treatment of elements in the landscape is comparable to the work of the British Pre-Raphaelite artists. Waldmüller visited London in 1856 bringing with him 34 works which were all sold at auction following a private audience with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, each of whom bought one of his paintings. While Waldmüller would have seen paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites at the Royal Academy, his technique and approach had developed independently, informed by his overriding desire to capture the truth of nature. 

The exhibition begins with his 'Self-Portrait' of 1828, one of his first portraits set in a landscape setting, in this case the Vienna Woods. In the 1830s he also made studies in the Prater, a natural park to the north of Vienna, both of groups of trees and individual specimens. The exhibition will include an extraordinary example from 1849, Large Prater Landscape. 

The exhibition will continue with his paintings of the Salzkammergut, an Alpine region near Salzburg, encompassing trees, views of the lakes and mountains, all rendered with a photographic clarity, limpid light, and almost-always bright blue skies and intense colour.  

'Waldmüller: Landscapes' will also focus on the artist’s views of Sicily, painted during visits each autumn from 1844 to 1846. His landscapes demonstrate the profound impact of the island’s light, landscape and Classical ruins on his work. 

And the final section of the exhibition will look at Waldmüller’s later works painted after his trips to Italy – where the effect that the extraordinary Italian light had on him continues to be felt. The exhibition will finish with 'Early Spring in the Vienna Woods' (1861, Belvedere, Vienna). Depicting a group of children gathering violets in the Vienna woods, it demonstrates his move away from pure landscape or scenes with small figures to one where he incorporated large-scale figures or groups.

The exhibition will comprise 13 works, mostly from the collection of the Belvedere, with other loans from the Liechtenstein Collection and the Vienna Museum.

'Waldmüller: Landscapes' is curated by Sarah Herring, Associate Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery and Dr Arnika Groenewald-Schmidt, Curator of the 19th-Century Collection, at the Belvedere, Vienna. 

Exhibition organised by the National Gallery, London in cooperation with the Belvedere, Vienna  

 
The H J Hyams Exhibition Programme
Supported by The Capricorn Foundation