Johann Till the Younger

Johann Till der Jungere was born on 19 July 1827 in Vienna. He trained first with his father, the painter Johann Till the Elder (1800 to 1889), before entering the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied from 1841 to 1847 and again from 1849 to 1865. Within the Academy he passed through the master classes of Leopold Kupelwieser and, later, Christian Ruben. In 1849 he received the Academy's Lampi Prize, and in 1847 he showed at the Academy's annual exhibition for the first documented time.

Till worked mainly in genre painting and history painting, producing rural and domestic scenes as well as historical subjects centered on medieval crusaders, monks, and pilgrims. He was represented in the exhibitions of the Austrian Art Association (Osterreichischer Kunstverein) between roughly 1851 and 1872, and from 1870 he was a member of the Vienna artists' cooperative, the Genossenschaft bildender Kunstler Wiens, known as the Kunstlerhaus. He died in Vienna on 21 November 1894.

Modern art-historical summaries describe Till as a genre painter attentive to rural and domestic detail, working alongside a parallel strand of history paintings built around crusader, pilgrim, and monastic subjects. No verified, word-for-word critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be located for this artist in the sources checked, so his current reputation rests on museum documentation, principally the Belvedere's holding of 26 works and the painting kept at Stift Klosterneuburg, rather than on a body of contemporary or modern press criticism.

The one documented auction result found for Johann Till the Younger is Blumenschmuck fur das Kruzifix, painted in 1852 and sold at im Kinsky, Vienna, on 26 April 2017 for a hammer price of EUR 1,750, or EUR 2,240 including fees and Austrian VAT. His paintings have also appeared in the Vienna secondary market at Dorotheum in 2014, 2015, and 2016, but no realized price for those sales could be confirmed in the sources checked. Because the Dorotheum results remain undocumented, the im Kinsky sale is the only verifiable price on record for this artist and should not be treated as a confirmed all-time high. Any claim of a record price for this artist should be checked against a primary auction-house archive before publication.

There is no documented gallery or estate representing Johann Till the Younger today; his paintings surface only through the Vienna auction houses Dorotheum and im Kinsky. There is no catalogue raisonne, so attribution and condition should be checked against the documented Belvedere and Klosterneuburg Abbey holdings and against each house's own provenance research. Buyers should also be careful with the name itself: auction and market databases typically list the artist simply as "Johann Till" (1827 to 1894), while art-historical sources use "Johann Till the Younger" to distinguish him from his father and early teacher, Johann Till the Elder (1800 to 1889). Confirming which Till is attached to a given work, and treating the single documented im Kinsky price as a data point rather than a proven record, are the two most important checks before transacting.