Hugo Charlemont

Biography

Hugo Charlemont was born in Jamnitz in Moravia in 1850. His father Matthias Adolf was a well-known miniature painter. It is therefore no coincidence that both Hugo and his brothers Eduard and Theodor embarked on a career as artists. From 1873, Hugo Charlemont was a student at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Eduard von Lichtenfels. He also learnt various printmaking techniques such as etching from Arthur William Unger and was a student of Hans Makart for a time. After travelling to the Netherlands and spending several years in Venice, he settled permanently in Vienna. He was already known for his versatile talent during his lifetime. His oeuvre includes landscape and genre paintings as well as still lifes, portraits and depictions of animals in a wide variety of techniques. His landscapes in particular, which were inspired by Impressionist painting, were extremely popular with collectors. Today, paintings by his hand can be found in the Belvedere and the Vienna Museum, as well as murals in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Charlemont was a member of the Vienna Künstlerhaus from 1872 and received numerous prizes at exhibitions in Austria and abroad, including the bronze medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900. The artist died in Vienna in 1939.

Charlemont was one of the most important Austrian landscape painters of the period before and after 1900. He was a close friend of Eugen Jettel and Franz Rumpler and was well acquainted with Theodor von Hörmann, Hugo Darnaut and the great Emil Jakob Schindler. In terms of painterly quality, his works are in no way inferior to those of his fellow artists who have received more attention in art historiography. This makes it all the more important to re-evaluate and honour his work today. The provenance of the ‘Poppies’ is the clearest evidence of the importance of his work in Vienna's fin de siécle and in the years of upheaval after 1900, when the city on the Danube rose to become one of the most important cultural centres in Europe. Hugo Charlemont himself gave the wonderfully fragrant oil painting to his gallerist on the occasion of his wedding in 1903, and the gallerist was none other than Gustav Pisko, whose gallery in Lothringerstrasse¹ exhibited the crème de la crème of the Viennese art scene, everything that was ground-breaking and forward-looking. Alongside Galerie Miethke and Galerie Arnot, Kunstsalon Pisko was one of the most important cultural centres in Vienna, together with the Secession. Here, visitors could familiarise themselves with current international trends through original works and admire the latest developments in Austrian painting on the road to modernism. In 1909, for example, Pisko organised the first exhibition for Egon Schiele's ‘New Art Group’, in which they were able to present their works to a broad public. The fact that Hugo Charlemont was one of the gallery artists emphasises his importance.

Lothringerstraße is part of the new city district that was created from 1860 onwards by the construction of the Glacis and which took on its present appearance with the arching and regulation of the Wienfluss.