ArtistAustrianb.1874–d.1952
Carl Fahringer
3 active items
Carl Fahringer was born on 25 December 1874 in Wiener Neustadt, a manufacturing city south of Vienna, and entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1892. There he studied under Sigmund L'Allemand, Christian Griepenkerl, and August Eisenmenger, the dominant academic painters of late nineteenth-century Austria. In 1898 he continued his training in Munich at the Art Academy under Carl von Marr, rounding out a formation shaped by the two great German-speaking art centers of the period.
Early in his career, Fahringer worked primarily as an animal painter and book illustrator. His visits to the Schonbrunn Zoo in Vienna produced closely observed studies of exotic animals - tigers, monkeys, birds of prey - that brought him recognition as one of Austria's most capable practitioners in the genre. Alongside the zoo studies, his early travels through Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, and Egypt gave his work a restless, documentary quality: markets, street scenes, animal dealers, desert light. These journeys laid the foundation for a practice that would always be driven by direct observation rather than studio invention.
Between 1920 and 1930, Fahringer undertook a series of extended trips to the Netherlands and from there to the Dutch East Indies, visiting Java, Bali, and the Sunda Islands. The encounter with tropical fauna and radically different landscapes transformed his approach. Moving away from the precision of his early animal studies, he developed a looser, more atmospheric manner - broad brush strokes, warmer light, compositions that absorbed figures and animals into their surroundings. The orientalist strain in his work from this period, including his large canvas "Eine Vision des Propheten Mohammed," placed him in a long European tradition of painters who processed the East as spectacle, but Fahringer's version was consistently anchored in direct field observation.
During the First World War, Fahringer served as a volunteer soldier and documented the front. His wartime drawings and paintings form a distinct chapter in his career, quite separate from the exoticism that preceded and followed them.
From 1929 to 1945, he taught at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, leading a master class in animal painting. His institutional presence helped shape a generation of Austrian painters working in the figurative tradition. He died on 4 February 1952 in Vienna, aged 78. His work is held by the Belvedere, the Albertina, Wien Museum, the Leopold Museum, and the Museum of Military History.
On the auction market, Fahringer appears regularly at Viennese houses. All 17 works in the Auctionist database are classified as paintings, with 3 currently active. The overwhelming majority have sold at im Kinsky in Vienna, with the top recorded result being 50,000 EUR for "Eine Vision des Propheten Mohammed," followed by 13,000 EUR for "Papagei und weisser Kakadu" and 8,000 EUR for "Markt auf Bali." The range across these results reflects the breadth of his subject matter: the market for his Orientalist and animal-focused work tends to outperform his Dutch landscape period.