This pristine and luminous painting belongs to the series of landscapes Waldmüller painted in the Austrian and German Alps around Salzburg in the 1830s. They mark the zenith of his development as a landscape painter, and an embrace of pure landscape for its own sake rather than merely as a backdrop for his portraits or scenes of peasant life. Summering in Bad Ischl and in Ahorn, he ventured forth to paint the Salzkammergut and the neighbouring Ramsau region in the Berchtesgaden Alps. Seen here are the Hoher Göll, the highest peak of the Göll massif, and the Hohes Brett, whose name (literally ‘high shelf’) derives from the flat, rocky plateau near its peak.

Waldmüller first honed his skills as a landscape painter copying the seventeenth-century Dutch masters and taking example from the landscapes of his illustrious predecessors, the father of Austrian landscape painting, Joseph Anton Koch, and German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. However, while Koch’s heroic landscapes evoked an Italianate classical past and were staffed by figures and shepherds from a bygone age, and Friedrich’s vistas were pregnant with religious and existential meaning, Waldmüller preferred a more naturalistic and nostalgic approach to landscape, celebrating the notion of Heimat (the untranslatable German word for home in the sense of a place and culture that feels familiar, safe, and constant) and belonging.

Arguably more influential than the masters who preceded him were Waldmüller’s own times and contemporaries. In 1821 landscape painting was formally introduced as a discipline at the Vienna Academy under teachers Josef Rebell and Franz Steinfeld, popularising it as a genre in its own right. As for the specific setting of Waldmüller’s paintings, the Salzkammergut had become a subject favoured by artists including Carl Friedrich Schinkel and Ferdinand Olivier in the 1820s; while stylistically, Waldmüller was influenced not only by his friend and fellow Austrian artist Friedrich Gauermann, but by the luminous early landscapes of Jean-Baptsite-Camille Corot, which he would have seen and admired during his visit to Paris in 1830.