Hans Makart

Hans Makart, born Johann Evangelist Ferdinand Apolinaris Makart, was born in Salzburg on 28 May 1840. He received early drawing instruction in Salzburg from Josef Mayburger and Johann Fischbach before enrolling in the preparatory class of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1858. He left the Academy after roughly a year, having been judged, in the account repeated across biographical sources, as insufficiently talented.

He then went to Munich, where he studied privately with a relative, Josef (Jost) Schiffmann, before entering the Academy of Fine Arts Munich around 1860. There he became a pupil of the history painter Karl Theodor von Piloty and remained under his instruction to about 1865, punctuated by study trips to London and Paris in 1862 and to Italy in 1863 and 1864.

Makart settled in Vienna, where his large, richly colored allegorical and historical canvases, together with his lavishly decorated studio, made him the city's most celebrated painter of the 1870s and early 1880s. His painting Entrance of Emperor Charles V into Antwerp brought him two Austrian medals and the French Legion d'honneur, and in 1878 he was appointed professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, heading its special school for history painting until his death; some sources give 1879 for the appointment. He undertook the monumental staircase decorations of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, begun in 1881.

He died in Vienna on 3 October 1884, at age 44. Multiple biographical sources agree on the date and place; a specific cause of death is not confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile.

Makart's contemporaries treated him as the embodiment of an era: the Belvedere Museum, which holds his cycle The Five Senses, frames him as an artist "like no other" in shaping Vienna's taste, to the point that "Makart style" and "Makart period" became standing terms for the decor and sensibility of the 1870s and 1880s. That same centrality drew academic criticism in his own time and after, with later art-historical writing noting objections to his loose regard for factual accuracy in history subjects and his liberal use of nude figures in ostensibly historical scenes. His studio itself became a cultural spectacle, drawing visitors and admiration from Vienna's elite social and artistic circles. Modern retrospectives, including a major Belvedere exhibition on Makart as "painter of the senses," have continued to reassess his role as the defining decorative painter of the Ringstrasse period.

Makart's market runs almost entirely through the secondary market and museum-linked scholarship rather than any gallery or estate structure, since he died in 1884 with no representing gallery or foundation. His auction record is The Death of Cleopatra (La morte di Cleopatra), which sold for EUR 757,300 (about USD 990,000 at the time) at Dorotheum in Vienna on 16 April 2013, described by the house at the time as the best price yet achieved for the painter. Sales of his work are concentrated at Central European houses, chiefly Dorotheum, im Kinsky, Lempertz, and Hampel, and results below the record vary widely by subject and scale, with several documented sales in the low hundreds of thousands of euros or well under.

There is no catalogue raisonne and no estate authentication body for Makart, so provenance documentation and museum exhibition history carry unusual weight in establishing a work's status. His presence in major public collections, including the Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musee d'Orsay, underscores a secure canonical position, but the auction market itself is thin and regionally concentrated, so any single result, including the 2013 record, should be read against a small and uneven sample rather than a deep, continuous price history.