Joseph Selleny

1824-1875 Austrian

Joseph Selleny

Novara voyage watercolorist

Joseph Selleny studied under Thomas Ender and Franz Steinfeld at the Vienna Academy. Study journeys took him through Tyrol and Lombardy to Venice. Endowed with a scholarship from the Vienna Academy, the artist lived and worked in Rome and Naples in 1854/55. Selleny’s talent earned him the patronage of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, the Emperor’s brother. Thanks to this connection he was able to circumnavigate the globe on board the Austrian frigate “Novara”, a journey which lasted from April 1857 to August 1859. During this time he produced around two thousand watercolours and studies of ethnographical and natural historical interest. In the 1860s he was a successful freelance artist and garden architect in Vienna, but he suffered from a nervous disorder, of which he died at the psychiatric hospital in Inzersdorf near Vienna at the age of fifty-one.

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