Friedrich von Amerling

Friedrich von Amerling was an Austrian portrait painter who was, with Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, the most-sought portraitist of the Biedermeier court of Vienna. He was born on April 14, 1803, in Vienna, the son of a goldsmith and silversmith of Moravian origin, and entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 12.

He continued his studies in Prague before traveling, between 1827 and 1828, to London, where he worked under the historical and portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence; he later studied in Paris with Horace Vernet and visited Rome and Italy. The English style of portraiture absorbed during his London year — its smoothness, its use of warm light, its attention to silk and skin — remained recognizable in his work for the rest of his life.

He returned to Vienna in 1828 and from 1832 served as court painter ("Kammermaler") to Emperor Francis I of Austria, a position that gave him access to the Habsburg family and the Viennese aristocracy. His portrait of the emperor in robes of state (1832) is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He produced a large body of portraits, including those of Crown Prince Rudolf, Prince Metternich and a long series of bourgeois Viennese sitters; his sentimental and allegorical compositions, such as Girl Looking Out of the Window (1830), are characteristic of Biedermeier taste.

He was raised to the Austrian nobility in 1878. He acquired Schloss Gumpendorf in Vienna and filled it with collections of paintings, antiquities and oriental objects that survive in part in Austrian museums. He died in Vienna on January 14, 1887, at the age of 83, and was buried in an honorary grave at the Vienna Central Cemetery.

His name Friedrich is the German form of Frederick, from the Old High German Fridurih — from fridu ("peace") and rīh ("ruler, power"), giving the sense "peaceful ruler." It is a masculine name long current in Austria.