Tina Blau was among the most successful landscape painters of her time. She taught at the public Art School for Women and Girls in Vienna and is considered a pioneer of Austrian plein-air painting in Impressionism and Realism.

Tina Blau was born in Vienna in 1845. Her father encouraged her talent from a young age and arranged for her to take private painting lessons with Antal Hanély, August Schaeffer and Josef Aigner. She first presented one of her paintings, which sold immediately, at the Vienna Kunstverein in 1867. In the following two years she also participated successfully in the opening exhibition of the Vienna Künstlerhaus and in the “Erste Internationale Kunstausstellung” [“First International Art Exhibition”] in Vienna. Between 1869 and 1874 she lived in Munich and studied with Wilhelm Lindenschmit jun..

Acquaintance with Emil Jakob Schindler
Early on, she found an important friend and companion in the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler. Blau and Schindler had met briefly in 1866 and became friends upon Blau’s return from Munich. Through Schindler, she met artists such as Eugen Jettel, Franz Rumpler, Eduard Charlemont and Julius Victor Berger, who would later teach Gustav Klimt at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. From 1874, Schindler and Blau shared a studio and accompanied each other on prolonged study trips in Austria and abroad. Their studio community disintegrated a few years later; a second studio which they had jointly rented in the Vienna Prater went to Tina Blau after Schindler’s wedding to the singer Anna Bergen – the mother of Alma Mahler-Werfel.

World’s Fairs and Artistic Breakthrough
Tina Blau was represented at many national and international exhibitions and participated in a total of five World’s Fairs, for instance presenting her works in Antwerp in 1885 and in Paris in 1900 – simultaneously with Gustav Klimt. She had seen her artistic breakthrough in 1881/82, when she had designed several floral murals and ceiling paintings as well as stained glass panels for Zierer Palace. The Klimt brothers and Franz Matsch, then still students, had also contributed to the decorations of the palace. At the same time, Tina Blau completed her monumental masterpiece Spring in the Prater (1882, Belvedere Vienna). The selection panel for the “Internationale Ausstellung im Wiener Künstlerhaus” [“International Exhibition at the Vienna Künstlerhaus”] initially refused to include the work in the exhibition, but revised its decision after an intervention by Hans Markart. The French minister of culture invited Blau to present Spring in the Prater at the Paris Salon the following year, where it won an award.  

Supporting Women Artists 
In 1883, Blau married the painter Heinrich Lang and moved back to Munich, where she taught landscape and still life painting at the Ladies’ Academy of the Munich Association of Women Artists from 1887. In 1894, Blau – who had by then been widowed for three years – finally returned to Vienna, where she continued to work as a painter and to commit herself to women’s education, teaching at the Art School for Women and Girls from 1898. She continued to teach until her health deteriorated in 1915. Tina Blau died in 1916.