Olga Wisinger-Florian (Born 1844) was an Austrian impressionist painter, mainly of flower still-lifes and landscapes. She originally trained as a concert pianist with Julius Epstein. Olga was a representative of Austrian Mood Impressionism. At nearly 30 years of age, Olga began to study painting under August Schaeffer and Melchior Fritsch in the 1870s and under Emil Jakob Schindler in the 1880s. Olga’s main motif was cultivated nature, especially flower arrangements, gardens and parks. In the mid-1870s, Olga switched to painting. From 1881 she regularly showed paintings at the annual exhibitions mounted at the artist's house. Later on, she often showed at Vienna Secession exhibitions. The works she showed at the Chicago and Paris international exhibitions earned her worldwide acclaim. Olga was awarded numerous distinctions and prizes. She adopted sublime approach to nature developed by Schindler in her landscape paintings. The motifs she employed were strongly reminiscent of her teacher's work.
The motifs included views of tree-lined avenues, fields and gardens. She broke with Schindler in 1884 and went her own way and started to paint landscapes that are more realistic. With flower pictures and landscape paintings that were already Expressionist in palette by the 1890s, Olga was years ahead of her time. In the late 1890s her work began to exhibit rich and increasingly iridescent coloring and she changed her focus to forest landscapes. During that same period she had achieved success at international exhibitions, and later participated in the annual exhibition of the Munich Glass Palace and the Vienna Künstlerhaus and received a medal at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.
