Der Rheinfall bei Schaffhausen

The Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen—the largest waterfall in Europe—was one of the great set-pieces of the Romantic landscape tour, a thundering natural spectacle that had drawn painters from Turner onward and that functioned as Switzerland's premier example of natural sublimity at close range. Sattler's view of the falls belongs to a tradition of Rheinfall depictions stretching back to the eighteenth century, in which each painter sought to capture the falls' scale and power through a combination of compositional drama and atmospheric rendering of spray and foam.

The falls' cascading water is rendered through broken, active paint application that conveys movement and the dissolution of water into spray, contrasting with the more stable paint surface used for the rocky walls and the castle on the promontory above. The tonal range from the brilliant white of the falls to the dark stone of the surrounding gorge creates dramatic contrasts.