Vilem ströminger

Vilém Ströminger was born on June 9, 1845 in Prague and died on June 27, 1901 in Prague-Vinohrady. He was a Czech landscape painter.

The eldest of four children, Vilém was born into the family of the portrait and history painter Jakub Ströminger (*1816 in Josefov) and his wife Terezie, née Lešáková (Ležáková). The family lived in the Prague district of Nové Město at Štěpánská Street no. 352/II. Vilém was baptized in St. Stephen’s Church and his godfather was the factory worker Wilhelm Preiss. It can be assumed that Vilém was apprenticed to his father and possibly further trained by his later father-in-law Antonín Gareis the Elder. His younger brother Jaroslav Ströminger (born 1862) was also a painter and was described as an academic portrait painter on his police application.

In 1868, Wilhelm appeared at the christening of his first daughter in Smíchov. There, on July 29, 1869, he married Johanna Gareis (March 10, 1845 Prague – after 1901), the daughter of the painter Antonín Jan Gareis from Nusle. This marriage produced four children: Maria (1868-1951), Terezia (*1872), Eleonora (*1875) and Vilém (*1870), who later became a mechanical engineer. The family lived in Vršovice, a suburb of Prague, until 1900 and then moved to Vinohrady.

Ströminger was a versatile painter with a broad spectrum of expressive forms ranging from Romanticism to Realism. His landscape painting was strongly influenced by earlier generations, including August Bedřich Piepenhagen, Josef Matěj Navrátil and Hugo Ullik. His paintings, mainly oil paintings, often show a classical composition of three planes (foreground, surroundings, background) with a small stagecoach in the foreground. While very few large-format and medium-sized paintings have survived, there are numerous small-format paintings. His landscapes are often dominated by castle architecture or city towers. The signature “V. Ströminger” is usually written in capital letters, often with a simple “V”. The majority of his paintings are neither signed nor dated, and there is speculation as to whether some works may have been painted by Ströminger’s father or his wife.

The most valuable collection of eight large-format, mostly signed paintings by Ströminger is in the possession of the Museum of the Capital City of Prague. It contains unique views of unpreserved parts of the city’s architecture from Smíchov, Libeň or Vršovice, as well as a unique view of the Chain Bridge under the castle in Děčín.