Josef Ignaz Mildorfer, Exhibition, Belvedere, Vienna: 19 September 2019-6 January 2020

The Belvedere Museum in Vienna is organising the first exhibition dedicated to the painter, Josef Ignaz Mildorfer, highlighting, above all, three central elements in his career. The first aspect that the exhibition aims to explain is the importance of the battle scenes: they date to the initial period in his work and, even if there are not many of them,  they show how the painter was involved in the politics of the time, in particular the War of the Austrian Succession.

Next, there is a section dedicated to Mildorfer’s career at the Art Academy in Vienna, where he studied until 1741, and taught from 1851 making him a highly influential drawing teacher, so that he hugely shaped the next developments of the Academy’s expressive style. Works by artists from this movement – such as Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724–1796)  form the core of the Belvedere’s Baroque collection.

By the end of the 1740s, the imperial couple Maria Theresia (1717–1780) and Franz I Stephan (1708–1765) were among Mildorfer’s most prominent clients, and to this day his frescoes in the Menagerie Pavilion at Schönbrunn and the Kapuzinergruft (Imperial Crypt) remain well preserved. The exhibition presents many additional select commissions of the painter’s from in and around Vienna.                                                  

Finally,  there's some space  dedicated to Mildorfer’s  other main clients who included the clergy, the aristocracy and the middle class. Though undoubtedly his most prestigious clients were Maria Theresa of Austria and Francis I.

This is a great opportunity to get to know a painter who had so much influence on the history of Austrian art.

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Upper Belvedere

 Prinz Eugen-Straße 27, 1030 Vienna