Anton Romako

Anton Romako was born on 20 October 1832 in Atzgersdorf, near Vienna. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna beginning in 1847, then studied in Munich under Wilhelm von Kaulbach from 1848 to 1850, before returning to Vienna to study privately with Carl Rahl in the early 1850s. In 1857 he moved to Rome, where he worked for close to two decades as a portraitist and genre painter for private patrons, reportedly including a portrait connected to Empress Elisabeth of Austria.

He returned to Vienna in the mid to late 1870s and worked there for the rest of his life, increasingly outside the mainstream of the city's art establishment. His large history painting Tegetthoff in the Battle of Lissa, painted around 1878 to 1880, is now considered one of his most significant works and remains in the collection of the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere. Contemporary Viennese critics of the period were largely unsympathetic to his style, and his later years were marked by professional neglect and financial hardship.

Romako died on 8 March 1889 in his apartment at Heumarkt 11 in Vienna and was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery. Sources differ on the immediate medical cause: Austrian reference sources including Dorotheum and the German-language Wikipedia entry describe a stroke, while one biographical index instead records kidney failure. Neither account is corroborated by a primary medical record, so both attributions are noted here rather than resolved. His reputation was largely rebuilt after his death, beginning around 1900 when the collector Carl Reininghaus began acquiring and promoting his paintings, part of a rediscovery that eventually linked him to the young Oskar Kokoschka.

Reception of Romako has moved in two distinct phases. During his lifetime, critics found his drawing and color choices eccentric, and a contemporary necrologue attributed the public's rejection of his work to what it called peculiarities in his drawing and treatment of color. That verdict began to reverse around 1900, when the collector Carl Reininghaus began promoting his paintings, part of a rediscovery that positioned the artist as a precursor to Oskar Kokoschka and to Expressionism more broadly. The 2018 Leopold Museum retrospective, Anton Romako: The Beginning of Modernism, extended that reassessment for a contemporary audience, framing him as a painter who anachronistically pointed the way toward modernism. The throughline across both eras is a focus on Romako's unconventional, psychologically charged handling of the figure, first as a liability and later as a virtue.

Romako's market is thin and almost entirely regional, running through Austrian auction houses rather than international sale rooms or galleries. The current documented high is EUR 117,000, achieved at Dorotheum's 19th Century Paintings sale in Vienna on 25 April 2024; the specific work is not identified in the available public sale summary. Earlier benchmark results include a GBP 49,250 sale of Ungarischer Bauernhof (Hungarian Farm) in 2010, and further results in the EUR 32,800 to EUR 44,800 range at Dorotheum and im Kinsky in more recent years. There is no evidence in the available record of any sale at a major international house such as Sotheby's or Christie's exceeding these Austrian results.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Romako, so provenance and museum exhibition history carry unusual weight in authenticating any given work; auction house specialists at Dorotheum and im Kinsky, and the documented holdings at the Belvedere and the Leopold Museum, are the practical reference points. His market is small in volume and geographically concentrated in Austria, so individual sale results should be read against a short and uneven price history rather than a continuous trend line. Signatures on his paintings appear in variant forms, including "A. Romako," which is a useful detail when checking a work against catalogue and auction records.