Die Burgruine Emmerberg in der neuen Welt bei Wiener Neustadt

Executed in 1905 in the final years of Rudolf von Alt's extraordinarily long life, this view of the ruined castle of Emmerberg in the Neue Welt near Wiener Neustadt demonstrates Alt's continued engagement with the Austrian landscape at the age of ninety-three. The castle ruin, a medieval fortification in the low hills south of Vienna, belonged to a type of subject — the picturesque ruin in its natural setting — that had been fundamental to Romantic aesthetics since the late eighteenth century. Burke's concept of the sublime, filtered through the tradition of Germanic Romantic landscape, found in ruined fortifications a perfect symbol of time's passage and human transience. By 1905, when Viennese culture was convulsed by the confrontations of the Secession, Alt painted these landscapes with serene detachment, the Romantic conventions of his youth now a form of private meditation. The work's survival into the twentieth century makes it also a document of an Austrian landscape that rapid modernisation would soon transform.

Alt's late watercolour technique in this work employs simplified, broad wash passages for the landscape setting, reserving more concentrated brushwork for the ruined masonry. The atmospheric handling of the surrounding vegetation — loose, wet washes of green and grey — contrasts with the more precise rendering of the castle's remaining walls and towers. The overall effect is one of quiet melancholy appropriate to the subject.