Austrian painter Franz Richard Unterberger, a Romantic style painter of waterscapes, landscapes, architecture and Genre, was born in Innsbruck, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 15th August 1838, one of eleven children of a wealthy bourgeois family. He decided to pursue a career as an artist at a relatively young age and enrolled in the Academy in Munich. Here he studied with Albert Zimmerman (1808-1888) a professor and landscape painter at the Academy and with Julius Lange (817-1878).

It was as a painter of Alpine landscapes that Unterberger first drew recognition, views particularly set in his native Tyrol. In 1860 Unterberger continued his studies in Düsseldorf; in what was to be a particularly significant period he was much taken by the work of Oswald Aschenbach (1827-1905) a landscape painter and his brother Andreas (1815-1910) also a landscape painter who worked extensively in Scandinavia before moving to Italy in the 1870’s.