Franz von Defregger

Biography

Franz (von) Defregger was born in 1835 as the son of a wealthy farmer on the Ederhof farm in East Tyrol. The young farmer's son soon abandoned his bold plan to emigrate to America after his father's early death, sold his parents' farm and went to Innsbruck in 1860 to study sculpture under Michael Stolz at the Innsbruck School of Arts and Crafts. Stolz soon recognised the pupil's exceptional talent and arranged a meeting with the widely renowned Munich history painter Karl Theodor von Piloty. On his advice, Defregger applied to the Munich Art Academy and was accepted into Hermann Anschütz's painting class in 1861. From 1863 to 1865, he spent time studying in Paris and worked in his mentor Piloty's studio on his return. Franz von Defregger's thematically and stylistically distinctive works were soon so well received that he was offered a professorship for history painting in the composition class at the Munich Academy of Art and taught there from 1878 to 1910. In 1883, he received the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown and was elevated to the nobility. Franz von Defregger ran a splendid salon in his prestigious house in Munich, but had a second residence in Bolzano, where he spent a lot of time. He died in Munich in 1921.

Alongside Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Wilhelm Leibl and Franz von Lenbach, Franz von Defregger is one of the most important artists of the so-called Munich School. In the second half of the 19th century, Munich artists had a decisive influence on the development of European art and turned the Bavarian capital into a veritable centre of painting between 1850 and 1914. More than almost any other painter of his time, the farmer's son Franz von Defregger was probably the congenial chronicler of rural life, an ‘insider’ so to speak, who was very familiar with rural histories, everyday life and mentalities. Early on, when he was still working with his fellow students Hans Makart and Gabriel von Max in the studio of his teacher Piloty, he created monumental genre and history paintings that soon attracted the attention of the art world. His numerous sensitive portraits - already distributed throughout Europe during his lifetime through book illustrations and prints - as well as the diverse depictions of local history and everyday rural life are characterised by an extraordinary sense of composition and colour and a precise ‘psychologising’ power of observation.