Eduard Zetsche
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Biography
Eduard Zetsche
Eduard Zetsche, born in Vienna in 1844, is one of the main representatives of Austrian Impressionism. A bank clerk by profession, he took private painting lessons from Robert Russ and his friend Emil Jakob Schindler, and also became acquainted with Tina Blau and Franz Rumpler in this circle of plein air painters. When Eduard Zetsche lost his job in 1873 as a result of the stock market crash, this was the turning point in his career: he decided to devote himself entirely to painting and enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts at the “Special School for Landscape Painting” under Eduard Peithner von Lichtenfels. His growing dissatisfaction with academic teaching led to an early transfer to the Düsseldorf Academy in 1879 - at that time the progressive center of landscape painting - to learn to “see and paint anew” under Professor Eugen Dücker. Eduard Zetsche was also impressed by the German-Russian artist's “sure, fine feeling for painting and the clear painting technique”, who taught radically new views on open-air painting. The consequent confrontation with the École de Barbizon and the achievements of the French Impressionists offered Eduard Zetsche a radically new perspective on his painting. The artist returned to Vienna in 1881 and numerous exhibitions at the Vienna Künstlerhaus, the Watercolorists' Club (of which he was secretary from 1886) and also internationally at the Munich Glaspalast and in Düsseldorf and Berlin quickly cemented his reputation as one of the most influential Austrian landscape painters of his era. As an attentive observer, Eduard Zetsche found his motifs mainly in the surroundings of Vienna, in the area of Heiligenkreuz Abbey, in the Wachau and the floodplains of the Leitha around Lichtenwörth. After his death in Vienna in 1927, the artist left behind an unmistakable oeuvre of paintings, for which he was awarded the Small Golden State Medal during his lifetime. Today, masterpieces by Eduard Zetsche can be found in the collections of the Albertina, the Belvedere, the Leopold Museum and the Lower Austrian State Museum.
