As the son of a major merchant, Rudolf Ribarz was supposed to take over his father's company, but as early as 1860 he took private drawing lessons. Although he also finished the commercial academy, after graduating in 1864/65 he enrolled at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and became a student of Albert Zimmermann. His fellow students were Emil Jakob Schindler, Eugen Jettel, Robert Russ and Adolf Ditscheiner. During the summer months, the students practiced landscape studies in the open air in the surroundings of Berchtesgaden. In Ribarz's case, however, a preference for strong light-dark contrasts became apparent as early as 1865. On the occasion of the opening of the Künstlerhaus in 1868, Ribarz submitted a painting for the first time, and a year later he took part in the I. International Art Exhibition in the Munich Glass Palace. There, at the same time, the paintings of French painters were on display, including Gustave Courbet, Camille Corot, Constant Troyon and Virgilio de la Peña, whose "paysages intimes" also impressed the Austrian painters - and confirmed them in their own artistic intentions. A few years followed for Ribarz, during which he traveled with friends through Italy, especially to Venice, where he met Leopold Carl Müller, Rudolf von Alt and August von Pettenkofen. His exposure to the French masters from Barbizon (Corot, Daubigny, Rousseau, and especially Troyon) had a great influence on Ribarz. When he went to Brussels in 1875, he again found a connection to the "Hague School", with whom he exhibited together at the "Exhibition of Living Masters" in The Hague in 1875 and 1876. Ribarz then settled in Paris for 16 years, where he had good contact with other Austrians in Paris through Eugen Jettel. In the meantime, he exhibited his works internationally, both at the Paris Salon and in Munich, Vienna, Berlin, and Venice, as well as at the World's Fairs in Paris, Chicago, and Antwerp.
Beginning in the 1880s, Ribarz turned to what he called "cabbage and turnip painting," switching from landscapes to flowers and fruits. Ribarz was professor of flower painting at the Vienna School of Applied Arts between 1892 and 1899, was curator of the Austrian section of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in Brussels in 1896, and became a member of the Arts Council in the Austrian Ministry of Education.
Artistically, Ribarz was at his peak in the 1870s, when he was able to paint landscapes of the northern French coast or the Netherlands with poetic moods. Subtly he modeled with the brush, while his palette shows conspicuously few, sometimes very strong colors. In the 1880s, on the other hand, inspired by the current Japonism of the time, he developed a virtuoso way of depicting flowers, which reached its peak in decorative panneaux.
Literature
M. Haja, Der Landschaftsmaler Rudolf Ribarz, Phil.Diss., Wien 1975; M. Haja, Rudolf Ribarz, Österreichische Galerie, Oberes Belvedere, Wien 1978; H. Giese, Rudolf Ribarz, in: Parnass, Wien 1996, Heft 2, S. 30ff; Nachschlagewerke: Thieme-Becker, Bénézit, Müller-Singer, Boetticher, Busse Nr. 67020