(Vienna 1776–1857)
Still Life with Flowers in a Glass Vase, signed, dated: S. Wegmayr 1822, oil on panel, 70 x 55.5 cm, framed, (GS)

Counterpart to lot 202

Provenance:
The property of an old Austrian aristocratic family.

Sebastian Wegmayr was one of the most famous Viennese flower painters of the first half of the 19th century. He studied flower painting at the Vienna Academy from 1797 to 1805. From 1807 to 1811 he was the assistant to his teacher, Johann Baptist Dreschler, at the Academy’s flower painting class. Wegmayr succeeded Dreschler as professor of flower painting in 1812, a position he held until 1850. Gerbert and Marianne Frodl, in their book Die Blumenmalerei in Wien (Vienna 2010, p.72), write of Wegmayr: “The representative bouquet...dominated his creative works almost exclusively for decades. He persevered in this respect, yet on the other hand, he developed a painterly signature, which frequently set him clearly apart from any other painters of his subject, such as Josef Nigg or Franz Xavier Petter, and which, in a certain sense, one could call expressive. Wegmayr’s compositions consist of larger shapes, the outlines of the blooms and the big herbaceous leaves appearing for the most part firm and, especially in his later works, sharp edged and hard…He preferred large-flowered, brightly coloured exotic hot-house plants, whose characteristics shaped the appearance of the painting. In dramatic contrast to these distinctive, individual shapes, he arranged bouquets against uniformly dark, even black, backgrounds, lending a particularly decorative tone to the pictures, sometimes extending beyond the bourgeois…”