Q28006671

Friedrich Gauermann produced this oil on canvas in 1829 and it is now held at the Belvedere, painted in the same year as his 'Cow shepherds resting in the meadow' at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The year 1829 was a productive one for the twenty-seven-year-old artist, who was then establishing his mature style through intensive outdoor study and a corresponding increase in the ambition and scale of his studio canvases. The Biedermeier art market of Vienna in the late 1820s was absorbing increasing quantities of quality landscape and animal painting as a newly prosperous middle class sought tasteful decorative objects that celebrated familiar Austrian scenery. Gauermann's work from 1829 shows him fully past the apprentice phase and producing canvases that established the compositional and coloristic formulas he would refine through the next three decades. The Belvedere's acquisition of a 1829 canvas alongside the Kunsthistorisches Museum holding from the same year indicates that both major Austrian national collections recognized the importance of this early period to Gauermann's artistic biography.

In 1829 Gauermann's palette had settled into the warm amber-green range that would define his mature work, with the cooler tones of his early output largely supplanted by a more confident, sun-saturated approach to Alpine color. He was building form through careful glazing over tonal underpaintings, a practice consistent with his study of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters. His animal rendering at this date already showed the accomplished anatomical observation that would distinguish him from more formulaic Austrian painters of rural subjects.