At the Monastery Fountain, 1836

Friedrich Gauermann (1807–1862) presents a busy rural scenery At the Monastery Fountain. Numerous horses, cows, sheep and goats are led to the fountain in the center of the picture, adorned by a pillar with a statue of the Virgin Mary. A little girl is passing a jug to a young man, laundresses are chatting in traditional costumes, a couple is locked in a struggling embrace behind the fountain. As in many of his other works, the artist combined topographical studies of various places to create a new reality. The Gothic gate is taken from a preceding study of the Franciscan Church in Salzburg. The fountain is the city fountain of Zell am See, which Gauermann – along with some of the figures in traditional costumes – used as a pictorial element in other works. Warm sunlight falling sideways through the trees turns genre scenes, architecture and landscape into an atmospheric unity. In keeping with the zeitgeist of the Biedermeier era, rural life is reinterpreted as an idyllic form of existence.

AGW, 2022