Franz Wiegele (1887-1944)

Franz Wiegele was born on February 23rd, 1887, the third of four children to the couple Gertrud and Franz Wiegele Sr. in Nötsch. The father was a machine fitter and ran a smithy in Nötsch. With his younger brother Alfred (1892 – 1979) he attended lower school in Trieste, but in 1900 changed to the secondary school in Klagenfurt, from which he graduated in 1905. During his school days, he was particularly enthusiastic about drawing lessons, which based on templates, plaster models and nature. Wiegele’s first drawings and painterly attempts are therefore precise, natural reproduction of the individual objects.

After Franz Wiegele had worked in his father’s smithy for a year, in 1907, probably at the sug...