(b Mistelbach, Lower Austria, 18 May 1853; d Hinterbrühl bei Mödling, Lower Austria, 25 Nov 1906). Austrian painter. He studied law in Vienna, abandoning his course to study landscape painting under the Austrian painter Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels (1833–1913) at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, also in Vienna. In 1875 he was awarded the Füger gold medal for Cain Slaying his Brother Abel. From 1875 to 1878 he lived in Düsseldorf, painting mainly nature studies based on scenes and landscape in Lower Austria. From 1878 he was a pupil of Léon Bonnat in Paris, concentrating on figurative work, which from then on played a larger role in his paintings, as in Procession in Dürnstein on the Danube (Vienna, Niederösterreich. Landesmus.) and Franz-Joseph Quay in Vienna (Vienna, Hist. Mus.). In 1880 he became a member of the Künstlerhaus, an exhibiting organization in Vienna. Motifs from the Cistercian monastery of Heiligenkreuz in Lower Austria are often featured in the background of his paintings, as in The Vision of St Bernard (1882; Vienna, Belvedere). Some of his best-known works were painted in the mid-1880s, including Winter (Funeral Procession on Snow-Covered Church Steps), from a cycle of the four seasons (1888; Vienna, Belvedere). In 1888 he won the silver state medal, and in 1889 a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1897 he was one of the founder-members of the Viennese Secession and frequently participated in their exhibitions, as well as contributing to the Secession’s magazine Ver Sacrum (e.g. Summer’s Night: Pool with Water Lilies, coloured woodcut, 1899). In 1902–3 he was president of the Secession and used his French contacts when setting up the exhibition Impressionismus in Malerei und Graphik (1903) in the Secession building. In 1905 he left the Secession, along with what were known as the Klimtgruppe. In his landscapes and genre paintings he poetically combined scenery and figures into a picturesque unity, searching for lighting effects and trying to achieve decorative effects through colour, as in Entrance to Paradise (1903–4; Munich, priv. col., see exh. cat., pl. 14). In his late works he also experimented with colour.