The history and portrait painter Michael Rieser was among the first teachers at the newly founded Imperial-Royal School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna, where he taught for 20 years. His students in the institution’s preparatory classes included Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch

Michael Rieser was born in Tyrol in 1828. As a teenager, he went to Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), where he was to train for a commercial career with his uncle. He discontinued his training and instead attended the local art school for a few years. From 1848 he studied at the Munich Academy and began attending the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts four years later. After his graduation, he spent several years in Italy.
 
A Teaching Post at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts
Michael Rieser returned to Vienna in 1868, having been appointed a faculty member of the newly founded Vienna School of Arts and Crafts – together with the architect Joseph Storck, the sculptor Otto König and the painters Ferdinand Laufberger and Franz Sturm – by Rudolf Eitelberger, the initiator of the Imperial-Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (now MAK – Museum of Applied Art, Vienna). Rieser became the head of the institution’s preparatory classes.

In the 1870s, Rieser’s students included Gustav Klimt, Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch, whose artistic talents he strongly promoted. They were for instance given the opportunity to contribute to the execution of his two glass window designs for Vienna’s Votivkirche, which was erected to give thanks for the failure of the attempt to assassinate Emperor Franz Joseph I.
 
Health Issues and Withdrawal
The painter taught at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts for a total of 20 years. In the school year of 1888/89, he retired permanently due to an illness and largely withdrew from public life. Michael Rieser, who had dedicated most of his life to religious history painting and church art, died in November 1905. According to a report in the newspaper Die Zeit dating from 12 November 1905, the attendees at his remembrance ceremony included Arthur von Scala, director of the Imperial-Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, and Rieser’s former student Franz Matsch, who was by now a professor at the School of Arts and Crafts.