Cows at drinking trough, Josef Wenglein (1845 - 1919)

This exquisite painting depicts a rural scene on a beautiful summer's day. The influence of the Barbizon school is clearly visible. This image of cows drinking from a river is a strong example of the colorist method Joseph Wenglein learned from his teacher Adolf Heinrich Lier. The treatment of color and the use of light and shade all contribute to the atmosphere of an early summer's day, and illustrate Joseph Wenglein's belief that landscapes should be natural, focus on overall effect rather than detail, and be what we might today call "deceptively simple".

Dimensions: 24 x 45 cm (With frame: 40 x 61 cm)
Signed lower right.

Biography: Josef Wenglein (1845 - 1919)

Painter Josef Wenglein is considered one of the last great landscape painters of the 19th-century Munich School. His works can be found in many museums and galleries in Germany and Poland (Bamberg, Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Mainz, Munich, Münster, Schwerin, Wiesbaden, Wroclaw, Wuppertal, Würzburg).
Wenglein was born in Munich in 1845. While studying law at Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University, Wenglein was already pursuing his artistic training at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Later, Wenglein turned completely to art and, in 1866, was accepted as a pupil in the studio of landscape painter Johann Gottfried Steffan. His most formative teacher, however, was the painter Adolf Heinrich Lier, whose painting school Wenglein attended for three years, and to whom he paid tribute in 1868 with his painting Adolf Lier peignant au Kalter (Neue Pinakothek, Munich). Later, Joseph Wenglein himself became a professor at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
Lier had come into contact with the painters of the Barbizon School in France and also familiarized his pupil Wenglein with their plein-air painting. Like his master, Josef Wenglein was inspired by the motifs of his surroundings and painted the Isar regions at different times of the day and year. The vast landscape of the Dachauer Moos, Nymphenburg Castle still in fog, or The limestone pickers in the Isar riverbed near Tölz are just a few examples of Wenglein's sensitivity and taste for the atmosphere of a place, which he was able to reproduce with atmospheric colors and effective contrasts.
Josef Wenglein died in Bad Tölz in 1919. Among his pupils in Munich was the Impressionist Otto Reiniger.