Ladies Can't Come to the Opening!

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Lilies Olga Wisinger-Florian

The name, Olga Wisinger-Florian (1844-1926) is not a common one in our art history books, but the work of this Viennese artist was well recognized in her own time. Her paintings were exhibited across Europe and in the World Fairs in Chicago (1893), Paris (1900) and St. Louis (1904), affording her work world-wide acclaim. Her clients included such illustrious luminaries of the time as Emperor Francis Joseph 1, Archduke Karl Ludwig and the Rothschild family.

Wisinger-Florian’s work is considered to be Austrian Mood Impressionism, or Stimmungsimpressionismus, a name bestowed upon a group of artists who were considered avant-garde in the late 1800s in Austria. She studied with prominent artists Melchior Fritsch, August Schaeffer and Emil Jakob Schindler. She was invited early in her career to exhibit at the prestigious House of the Artists, an institution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but, as with all women at the t…