Biography

Austrian painter, son of the sculptor Franz Steinfeld the Elder and father of the painter Wilhelm Steinfeld. From 1802-1812, he studied at the Vienna Academy under Lorenz Janscha (1749-1812), Martin von Molitor (1759-1812) and Albrecht Christoph Dies (1755-1822). He traveled to Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands, where he studied the seventeenth-century landscape painters. Between 1815 and 1835 he was court painter of Archduke Anton Victor; from 1845 professor at the Vienna Academy.

He was a landscape painter, who broke with the Baroque tradition and exerted a strong influence on the emerging Vienna school of landscape painting. He is considered to be the father of the classical Biedermeier landscape, and his Hallstatt landscape (1824, Niederösterreichischen Landesmuseum) is considered a masterpiece of romantic realism.