Garden in Plankenberg

Emil Jakob Schindler's 'Garden in Plankenberg' (1886) is one of several works he painted at the Plankenberg estate in Lower Austria, a landscape he returned to repeatedly and where the Schindler family lived for extended periods. The estate's garden, set within the cultivated Lower Austrian countryside, provided him with subjects that combined the natural and the architectural — the garden as shaped nature, the cultivated landscape as a form of art. His atmospheric treatment of the Plankenberg garden subjects is among his most characteristic and sensitive work.

Schindler renders the Plankenberg garden with his distinctive silver-grey atmospheric approach — the garden's forms dissolved into the unified tonal atmosphere that was his primary pictorial concern. His palette for the Lower Austrian landscape is typically cool and muted, the quality of the local light creating a different atmospheric character from the brighter environments he had studied during his Italian years. Plants and paths are integrated within the atmospheric unity rather than documented in detail.