Prater Landscape

Compared to his portraits and genre scenes, Waldmüller’s landscapes are fewer in number but not less in importance. They demonstrate that plein air painting can even be consistent by doing without an emphatically subjective, spontaneous brushstroke, thus allowing the depiction of minute detail. The harsh light and the abrupt spatial contrasts of Waldmüller’s later paintings are not yet to be found in this early Prater landscape. Spreading out peacefully under the bushy foliage of the elms, the green of the meadow continues into the bright distance. The horizon is remarkably low, delineated by the new blocks of flats in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt. For stylistic reasons the very small, partly obscured signature has usually been read as “1830.” That would make this picture the first in a series of about ten small and four larger landscapes showing Vienna’s Prater. The last one of these, the so-called Large Prater Landscape (1849, Vienna, Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere) clearly seems to have more weight and pathos than the Berlin picture, which is bathed in cool morning light and populated by only one small accessory figure.