The Ruins of the Temple of Juno Lacinia

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Lake Wolfgang, 1835 Room 1 in the National Gallery currently has a free exhibition of landscape paintings by the Austrian artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865). When he started painting studies of the trees around Vienna and Alpine landscape near Salzburg, he was already a well-established portrait painter. This change of course may have been influenced by a trip to Paris in 1830 - his diary records that he saw a Constable there. My photo above of his beautiful 1835 painting Lake Wolfgang can't capture the subtlety of those indigo shades used for the water and mountain slopes. Nineteenth century critics complained that his naturalistic style 'bordered on 'daguerrotype-like precision', but they must have been impressed by how he managed to paint those tiny clouds and distant details with such realism.Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, The Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina and Mount Etna, 1844In the 1840s he headed south, where the bright sunlight…