Dachstein with Gosausee, 1834

In the early 19th century, Vienna’s nobility increasingly explored the Alpine regions of the monarchy. This interest in the local mountains was also reflected in the motifs of Viennese Biedermeier painting. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865) had studied the motif for his 1834 painting Dachstein with Gosausee on site: The foreground shows the beginning of the shore, where the artist was standing, as well as the lake whose surface mirrors the snow on the mountains. The middle ground is taken up by the ascending forest and the first darkened rocks, while the background reveals the dominant motif of the Dachstein massif with its luminous white glaciers. Despite all the staging – from darkness towards light – the artist was less concerned with symbolically charging the composition (as was common in German Romanticism of the time) than with creating a detailed rendering of reality. Waldmüller’s landscape art was indebted to a realism that was new for the genre at the time.

MK, 2021