Anna Stainer-Knittel

Anna Stainer-Knittel (Elbigenalp, 1841 – Wattens, 1915) was an Austrian portrait and flower painter. She is remembered both for her career in a field where women faced many obstacles to training, and for an episode from her youth that inspired a novel, an opera and several films.

She came from a family with artistic ties: her uncle was the sculptor Josef Alois Knittel, and her great-uncle was the painter Joseph Anton Koch. She began her studies in 1859 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, but was not allowed to attend the main school because she was a woman. In 1864 she had to return home for lack of funds. In those years she painted many portraits of her family and landscape views. She later moved to Innsbruck, where she supported herself as a portrait painter.

In 1867, against her parents' wishes, she married the ceramicist Engelbert Stainer, for whose cups, plates and saucers she created many floral designs. Between 1868 and 1871 the couple had three children, two sons and a daughter. In 1873 she opened a painting school for women, which she ran almost until her death. Among her students were Maria Tilipaul-Kistler and Wilhelmine Redlich.

At the age of seventeen she volunteered to rappel down a rock face to remove an eagle's nest, a common practice in the nineteenth century to keep eagles away from local sheep herds. She managed to seize the eaglet, put it in her rucksack and climb back up without incident, although it was later said that an adult eagle had attacked her during the climb. Ludwig Steub described the event in 1863 in his story Das Annele im Adlerhorst, and it was later recounted in Wolfs Illustrirter Rundschau. In 1875 Wilhelmine von Hillern turned it into the novel Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Maiden), renaming the heroine Walburga, or Wally, and dramatizing her conflict with her father. In 1892 Alfredo Catalani adapted the story as the opera La Wally, and it was filmed several times, including versions from 1921, 1940 and 1956.

Although her popular fame rests largely on that story, her paintings and her school for women are her most direct contribution to Austrian art.