Plains Landscape near Plankenberg

Emil Jakob Schindler's 'Plains Landscape near Plankenberg' (1889) depicts the flat agricultural landscape of the Tulln plain in Lower Austria — a landscape that provided him with subjects quite different from the romantic Middle Rhine or the Austrian Alps that many of his contemporaries favored. The flat, agricultural plain was an overlooked landscape in the Austrian tradition, and Schindler's sustained attention to its particular quality — its vast sky, its horizontal sweep, its seasonal transformations — elevated it to the level of serious artistic subject.

Schindler renders the Lower Austrian plain with his characteristic tonal atmosphere — the flat landscape's dominant sky given primary compositional importance, the horizontal ground a narrow band below the atmospheric depth of the overcast or clearing sky. His palette for the plain subjects is typically cool and muted, with the atmospheric unity of his approach finding the subtle tonal variations within an apparently monotonous terrain.