In the Tuileries

Painted in 1888 during Hörmann's Paris years, this canvas depicts the Tuileries Garden — one of the great Parisian public spaces and a recurring subject for Impressionist painters who valued its combination of formal garden geometry and the animation of Parisian public life. Monet, Renoir, and others had painted the Tuileries, and Hörmann's version situates him explicitly within that tradition while reflecting his own Austrian sensibility. The garden, redesigned under Haussmann and Napoleon III, was a space where classes mixed in the open air, and Impressionists found in it an emblem of modern Parisian life. 1888 was a key year for Hörmann: his technique was fully absorbing Impressionist principles, and his Paris subjects show him at his most directly engaged with French modernity. The Belvedere holds this work as evidence of Austrian participation in the Impressionist moment.

The Tuileries' formal geometry — straight allées, symmetrical parterres, the Seine beyond — offers Hörmann a spatial structure more architectural than his Austrian landscape subjects. Figures in the garden are handled with Impressionist looseness: coloured patches that read as people in motion or repose. Dappled light through plane trees creates the broken-light effects central to Impressionist technique.