Waldmüller at the National Gallery – the rebel of the great outdoors

A breath of fresh air ripples through Waldmüller: Landscapes at the National Gallery. If all you know of this Austrian artist (1793-1865) are his benign gents and busy ladies in empire line dresses, then think again. Waldmüller painted Alpine valleys ringing with cowbells and violets appearing out of spring snows, breezes cooling the Vienna Woods in summer and the first frosts of autumn on Austrian mountains.

His paintings are small and bright and cleanly composed. He has a real gift for near and far. A far-distant view of blue remembered hills, still capped with snow despite the heat, is directly connected to the summer meadow in the foreground through the lengthening shadows of afternoon sun.

The ruins of Liechtenstein Castle are hidden behind tall trees in Waldmüller’s eponymous 1848 painting. The eye follows a rocky path up through the landscape, and the picture, from pale foreground boulders to deeper middle-ground shadows, where a small female figure takes a rest (as does the eye). Right at the top is a fraction of sunstruck golden stone that gives away the castle’s secret location. Waldmüller loves to play pictorial hide and seek.

He does it with the Hohenzollern Waterfall near the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl. This thrilling torrent of blue water appears from on high in the middle of a forest, and then disappears (or so it seems) altogether. But way down at the foot of the painting, bottom left, is a much smaller spray of blue froth emerging through rocks: the incredible shapeshifting variations of a river.

The artist trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna but learned very little from what he regarded as the most conservative of methods. He travelled widely, visiting Rome, Paris and there, the Louvre, more than a dozen times. For a while he lived in Croatia until marriage to a singer took him on tour across Europe.

Several paintings in this exhibition show the incredible heat and dust of Sicily in high summer. He paints a Roman temple at Agrigento on a hill of baked rock, exactly the hot gold of the temple, from a foreground of drought-resistant agave. The plant’s spikes lead to the respite of silvery blue olive trees in the middle distance. And all of this history and heat is condensed in a tight composition beneath a blazing blue sky.

Vast panoramas on a human scale, by Waldmüller, can even become miniatures. He has a hill village above Taormina that is almost as small as Thomas Jones’s wonderful A Wall in Naples. And into this small depiction of an expansive view comes the great question of the eye in deep heat: what can you make out and what remains an illusion in all this shimmer?

This small but charming show comes, in its entirety, from the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and several of the works were also painted in that city. Large Prater Landscape, from 1849, shows the great park in Leopoldstadt in high summer. Grassy paths disappear away into the hot dark shadows beneath the high trees. It looks just like Hyde Park now.

But all this outdoor art landed Waldmüller in deep trouble. He became professor of the very academy he disliked in his youth, tried to put nature at the epicentre of the art education, and ended up publishing diatribes against the institution. Needless to say, he was fired. For a while, he seems to have reverted to the enamel-bright domestic scenes that which brought him money and made him the apogee of the Biedermeier style of middle-class security and comfort.

Queen Victoria loved his buoyantly moral pieces. So, alas, did Hitler. Waldmüller’s genre scenes were stolen from Jewish families by the Nazis during the Second World War and his posthumous reputation was damaged by association. But the National Gallery, with the Belvedere, has chosen to show only what the painter truly believed in, and which served his art best: nothing less than the great outdoors.

Waldmüller: Landscapes is at the National Gallery until 20 September

Photograph courtesy Wien Museum Karlplatz, Vienna