Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865) painted the Austrian landscape with a precision that has no equivalent in 19th-century European art—not the grand romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, not the golden haze of the Barbizon school, but something harder and more exacting. The skies are a vivid, uncompromising blue. The exact texture of bark on a dying tree, the clarity practically photographic. Waldmüller developed his approach independently, and influenced the generation of Austrian artists that followed. This National Gallery exhibition is the first on Waldmüller in the U.K.; the works are mostly drawn from the Belvedere, in Vienna. —Elena Clavarino