Blick auf Linz

'Blick auf Linz' (View of Linz) depicts the Upper Austrian city on the Danube that served as a provincial capital and waystation on the river trade route between Vienna and Passau. Linz lacked the spectacular Alpine backdrop of Salzburg or Innsbruck and the imperial grandeur of Vienna, but its Danube setting and modest prosperity gave it a characteristic Middle European urban dignity that Sattler recorded with his customary topographic thoroughness. The Danube as it flowed through Linz—wide, brown, and working—provided the main landscape element.

The Danube's broad expanse provides the painting's dominant horizontal element, with the city's modest skyline occupying the middle distance above the river's far bank. Sattler renders the working river with its characteristic grey-brown color, the atmospheric haze over the water giving the industrial river town a softer, more picturesque quality than its prosaic character might suggest.