View of St.Charles’s Church and the Polytechnic Institute

View of St. Charles's Church and the Polytechnic Institute, dated 1831 and executed in graphite for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is a drawing rather than a painting, demonstrating that Alt's early practice extended across media. The subject — the Karlskirche of Vienna, Fischer von Erlach's Baroque masterpiece of 1716–37, juxtaposed with the nearby Polytechnic Institute (today the TU Wien) — shows Alt documenting the architectural character of Vienna's Wieden district in the early Biedermeier period. The Metropolitan Museum's acquisition of this drawing reflects the broad international collecting interest in Austrian Biedermeier art, which entered American collections through the European art market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Graphite on paper gives Alt maximum control over architectural line work: his pencil drawing shows the fine, even pressure strokes of a trained architectural draughtsman, with hatching used for shadow zones and pure outline for lit surfaces. The Karlskirche's distinctive columns — derived from Trajan's Column in Rome — are the compositional centrepiece and most technically demanding element.