Joseph von Führich

He lived to see the day when, becoming celebrated as a composer of scriptural episodes, his sacred subjects were transferred in numberless repetitions to the roadside churches of the Austrian state, where peasants thus learnt to admire modern art reviving the models of earlier ages.

His first inspiration was derived from the prints of Dürer and Peter von Cornelius' illustrations to Goethe's Faust,[1] and the first fruit of this turn of study was the Genofeva series.

[3] Führich was an adherent of the Nazarene movement, a romantic religious artist who sought to restore the spirit of Dürer and give new shape to biblical subjects.

[2] According to an assessment in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "[e]ssentially creative as a landscape draughtsman, he had no feeling for colour; and when he produced monumental pictures he was not nearly so successful as when designing subjects for woodcuts.

His "Prodigal Son", especially, is remarkable for the fancy with which the spirit of evil is embodied in a figure constantly recurring, and like that of Mephistopheles exhibiting temptation in a human yet demoniacal shape.