Joseph von Führich Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

, was born at Kratzau

Chrastava

Chrastava is a town in northern Bohemia in the Czech Republic about 10 kilometre northwest of the regional capital Liberec. The town is situated on the Jeřice brook near to its confluence with the Lusatian Neisse...

  in Bohemia

Bohemia

Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...

. Also known as Josef Ritter von Führich.

Deeply impressed as a boy by rustic pictures adorning the wayside chapels of his native country, his first attempt at composition was a sketch of the Nativity

Nativity of Jesus in art

The Nativity of Jesus has been a major subject of Christian art since the 4th century. The artistic depictions of the Nativity or birth of Jesus, celebrated at Christmas, are based on the narratives in the Bible, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and further elaborated by written, oral and...

 for the festival of Christmas

Christmas

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday generally celebrated on December 25 by billions of people around the world. It is a Christian feast that commemorates the birth of Jesus Christ, liturgically closing the Advent season and initiating the season of Christmastide, which lasts twelve days...

 in his father's house. He lived to see the day when, becoming celebrated as a composer of scriptural episodes, his sacred subjects were transferred in numberless repetitions to the roadside churches of the Austrian state, where humble peasants thus learnt to admire modern art reviving the models of earlier ages.

Führich has been fairly described as a Nazarene

Nazarene movement

The name Nazarene was adopted by a group of early 19th century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive honesty and spirituality in Christian art...

, a romantic religious artist whose pencil did more than any other to restore the old spirit of Dürer

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since...

 and give new shape to countless incidents of the gospel and scriptural legends. Without the power of Cornelius

Peter von Cornelius

Peter von Cornelius was a German painter.Cornelius was born in Düsseldorf.His father, who was inspector of the Düsseldorf gallery, died in 1799, and the young Cornelius was stimulated to extraordinary exertions...

 or the grace of Overbeck

Johann Friedrich Overbeck

Johann Friedrich Overbeck , was a German painter and member of the Nazarene movement. He also made four etchings.-Biography:...

, he composed with great skill, especially in outline. His mastery of distribution, form, movement and expression was considerable. In its peculiar way his drapery was perfectly cast.

Essentially creative as a landscape draughtsman, he had still no feeling for colour; and when he produced monumental pictures he was not nearly so successful as when designing subjects for woodcuts. Führich's fame extended far beyond the walls of the Austrian capital, and his illustrations to Tieck's Genofeva, the Lord's Prayer, the Triumph of Christ, the Road to Bethlehem, the Succession of Christ according to Thomas a Kempis

Thomas à Kempis

Thomas à Kempis was a late Medieval Catholic monk and the probable author of The Imitation of Christ, which is one of the best known Christian books on devotion. His name means, "Thomas of Kempen", his home town and in German he is known as Thomas von Kempen...

, the Prodigal Son, and the verses of the Psalter, became well known. His Prodigal Son, especially, is remarkable for the fancy with which the spirit of evil is embodied in a figure constantly recurring, and like that of Mephistopheles

Mephistopheles

Mephistopheles is a demon featured in German folklore...

 exhibiting temptation in a human yet demoniacal shape.

Führich became a pupil at the Academy of Prague in 1816. His first inspiration was derived from the prints of Dürer and the Faust of Cornelius, and the first fruit of this turn of study was the Genofeva series. In 1826 he went to Rome, where he added three frescoes to those executed by Cornelius and Overbeck in the Palazzo Massimi. His subjects were taken from the life of Tasso

Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...

, and are almost solitary examples of his talent in this class of composition.

In 1831 he finished the "Triumph of Christ" now in the Raczynski palace at Berlin. In 1834 he was made custos and in 1841 professor of composition in the Academy of Vienna. After this he completed the monumental pictures of the church of St Nepomuk, and in 1854-1861 the vast series of wall paintings which cover the inside of the Lerchenfeld church at Vienna. In 1872 he was pensioned and made a knight of the order of Franz Joseph; 1875 is the date of his illustrations to the Psalms

Psalms

The Book of Psalms , commonly referred to simply as Psalms, is a book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible...

.

Von Führich died in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

. His autobiography was published in 1875, and a memoir by his son Lucas in 1886.