Engelmüller Ferdinand (Prague 22. 12. 1867 - Prague 29. 9. 1924) painter and graphic artist

In 1889 he was admitted to the vocational school of Professor Julius Mařák at the Academy of Painting in Prague without examination. He remained there until 1894. His first painting On the Dead Arm of the Elbe was exhibited in 1891 at the Land Jubilee Exhibition in Prague. In 1896 he was one of the founders of the Manes Association, of which he became an executive. In 1897 he founded a painting school in Prague, which he successfully led for many years and which they went through, for example, raised Otakar Nejedly, Gustav Macoun, Jaroslav Setelik, Otakar Stafl, etc. This school later (in 1920) received state subsidies for the Academy of Painting in Prague. In 1898 he broke up with Manes and became a permanent member of the Union of Fine Artists in Prague. From 1907 to 1908 he stayed in the art colony of Worpswede and Dachau near Munich. He has made numerous study tours in Russia, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Tyrol. In 1908 he was appointed full member of the Union internationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In May 1916 he moved from the studio on Masarykovo nábřeží to the old Hrzánovský House in Loretánské Street in Hradčany, where he expanded his painting school. He was also a renowned master of crayons, which he used extensively for his landscape motifs and introduced them to Czech landscape painting.
Engelmüller studied natural beauty, was a reclusive lover of melancholic nature and the past. With a deep sense of mood and soul, he painted and drew his dreamy landscapes, old parks, abandoned and overgrown monastic and chateau and picturesque corners of Prague. Since 1902 he has devoted himself entirely to the cycle Czech Landscape, which he wanted to capture the appearance of the home region at various times of the day and time of year. His favorite landscape was the Elbe River, and he also found ideas in the Sumava and Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. However, he also has numerous paintings from Old Prague, Slovakia, Holland, Germany, Italy and Russia. More and more he also composed fantasy landscapes, often with figural staff. He urged monumental forms and his paintings became part of many representative interiors of important domestic and foreign institutions.