Der Friedhof in Gastein

Rudolf von Alt's 1898 view of the cemetery in Gastein, now in the Leopold Museum, depicts the graveyard of the celebrated Alpine spa resort with a directness that places death and mortality at the centre of a landscape famous for its health-giving waters. Bad Gastein, in the Gastein valley of Salzburg province, was one of the most fashionable Alpine resorts of the nineteenth century, attracting European royalty and aristocracy to its thermal springs. Its cemetery, carved into the steep hillside above the resort town, was the final destination of visitors and residents alike, the Alpine setting lending it a grandeur that contradicted any idea of humble repose. Alt was eighty-six when he painted this subject — an age at which contemplation of mortality was hardly abstract — and the choice of a cemetery as subject in his late career carries autobiographical weight. The Leopold Museum's collection preserves some of Alt's most important late works alongside Vienna's major holdings of Viennese modernism.

Alt frames the cemetery with the characteristic elements of Alpine graveyard composition: iron crosses, carved headstones, and the surrounding mountain landscape. The oil on canvas medium gives this late work more tonal depth than his watercolours, with the muted palette — greens, greys, and the dark verticals of cypress or fir — creating a meditative, still atmosphere appropriate to the subject.