Anna Lynker was born in Vienna in a family of porcelain manufactory owners. She began to take drawing lessons already at an early age. In 1854, when she was twenty, she moved to Graz, and in 1863 she became a student of the landscape painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (1807–1863) in Karlsruhe. She further improved her skills at the Academy in Düsseldorf with the painter Albert Flamm (1823–1906), likewise a landscapist; thus she managed to develop thoroughly her abilities as a painter of landscapes. She painted the currently exhibited watercolours in the Middle East, where she lived and made study travels in the late 1860s and in the 1870s, so she was awarded the significant title of “pictor et viator”. She also visited Sarajevo; some of her motifs were reproduced in the Sarajevan journal Nada (1895), in which, among other painters, also the Slovenian painter Ivana Kobilca reproduced her works.
Anna Lynker is indirectly linked to the highly experienced Slovenian diplomat and politician Baron Josef Schwegel/Jožef Švegel (1836–1914), who must have bought a few of her works during his office in Egypt. Thus it is thanks to Schwegel that these watercolours by Lynker have found their home in Slovenia, since after the death of his wife Marija in 1933, all their collections came as a legacy to the National Museum in Ljubljana. The Lynker watercolours, oils and art prints are housed in various museums in Austria, Poland and Germany, and they are joined here by four yet unpublished and non-exhibited works by her owned by two Slovenian museum institutions.
Authors
Lidija Tavčar, Tina Buh
Translated and proofread by
Alenka Klemenc
The artworks were loaned by
Narodni muzej Slovenije
5 September–3 October 2013
National Gallery of Slovenia
Prešernova 24
1000 Ljubljana