Franz von Defregger grew up on his parents' farm in Stronach in the Puster Valley. His career as a painter initially began in Innsbruck, in the 1860s it led him to Paris via the Munich Academy and finally back to Munich to Karl von Piloty's class for history painting, where he would complete his studies in 1867-1870. Many of the dirndl portraits, for which he became famous, can be traced back to his stays in Bolzano from 1872 onward. Eventually, he had a villa with a studio built there and spent spring and autumn there. From the early 1880s, his prestigious villa on Munich's Königinstrasse became a cultural center and attested to his status as a rising star in the Munich art scene, which he held alongside the mason and miller sons Lenbach and Stuck, today celebrated as 'painter princes'. In addition to genre-like depictions of recent history, which stand in strong contrast to the elaborately staged history and society paintings of his teacher, he mainly created everyday scenes of Tyrolean peasant life. Inns, farms and village squares serve as his backdrop. With his work, Defregger quickly became one of the most popular genre painters of the Munich School and subsequently exerted an strong influence on coming generations. In 1878, he was appointed professor of history painting in the composition class at the Munich Academy, a post he held until 1910. [KT]