Biography

Hungarian painter. He studied at Carl Rahl in Vienna and Munich in 1857 where he began painting romantic historic pictures in Piloty's style. Due to his harmonic colouring and well-balanced composition, the illustrations for Goethe's Faust, Schiller's Bandits and Das Lied von der Glocke, brought him a lot of success. In 1870 he was invited to paint the portrait of Emperor Franz Josef in Vienna. After the years 1880-83, when he was the director of the Stuttgart Academy, he returned to Munich where he worked as a teacher in the art school. His major pictures: St. Elizabeth of Hungary (painted in two, almost identical versions), Queen Elisabeth Signs the Death Sentence of Mary Stuart, Venus and Tannhäuser, and Faust and Marguerite.