Friedrich von Amerling

Friedrich von Amerling painted the Habsburg aristocracy and did it well enough to be ennobled for it. He studied in Vienna, Prague and London, where Thomas Lawrence’s fluency made a lasting impression, and returned to become the leading portraitist of Biedermeier Vienna.

Skin and fabric are his strengths. The silks have weight, the flesh is warm rather than waxy, and the children in particular escape the stiffness that period portraiture usually imposes on them.

He painted Emperor Franz I and a long procession of nobles, but the private pictures, sitters caught reading or half smiling, carry more life. He travelled widely in later years, married four times, and kept working into his eighties as photography steadily removed the market he had built a career on.