(b.1803 - d.1887)
Austrian
painter. He came from a family of craftsmen and studied (1815--24) at the
Akademie der bildenden Kunste, Vienna, where one of his teachers was the
conservative history painter Hubert Maurer (1738--1818). From 1824 to 1826
he attended the Academy in Prague, where he was taught by Josef Bergler. In
1827 and 1828 Amerling stayed in London, and he met the portrait painter
Sir
Thomas Lawrence, whose work was to be a strong influence on Amerling's
painting during the next two decades. Amerling also travelled to Paris and
Rome but was recalled to Vienna on an official commission to paint a
life-size portrait of the emperor Francis I of Austria (Vienna,
Ksthist. Mus.). With this work, Amerling became the most sought-after
portrait painter in Vienna, a position he was to retain for about 15 years.The highpoint of Amerling's work occurred in the 1830s. At that time he was able to combine the stylishness of English portrait painters---both his own contemporaries as well as the older generation such as Reynolds---with the realist traditions of Viennese bourgeois portraiture. Large-scale individual portraits and family or group pictures were equally successful. Among Amerling's most important works are two family pictures with nearly life-size figures, Graf Breunner and his Family (1834; priv. col., see Probszt, pl. 40) and Rudolf von Arthaber with his Children (1837; Vienna, Belvedere; see fig.). These pictures, particularly the latter, are often seen as the epitome of Viennese Biedermeier culture in their concern for both emotional and material comfort. Among the vast number of portraits by Amerling, many were of important citizens, aristocrats, members of the royal family or artists, as in The Painter Robert Theer (1831; Vienna, Belvedere). Amerling also made a large number of spontaneous, often roughly sketched portrait studies that directly capture physiognomy in a manner more independent of the style of the time. These pictures, which show only the subject's head, are among the most striking achievements of European portrait painting of the period. Amerling generally reserved this type of portrait for members of his family, children and artist friends, as in The Painter Eduard Bendemann (1837; Vienna, Belvedere). One of Amerling's particular specialities was the 'one-figure genre painting', in which the subjects appear either in a costume alien to the milieu, as in the Woman Playing a Lute (1838; Vienna, Belvedere), or in scenes with an implied story-line, as in The Widow (1836; Vienna, Hist. Mus.).
His close ties to English painting, his sophistication and his ambition enabled Amerling to go beyond the boundaries of the local Viennese tradition. After 1850 developments caught up with him, however: his painting failed to adapt to changes in taste, though his good reputation remained with him into old age. In spite of his great popularity, Amerling never taught at the Akademie. He had many private pupils, but only one of them, Josef Matthaus Aigner (1805--86), is worthy of mention