After the Battle

Here the battle is over, and most of it is barely described. Horses, a covered wagon and a knot of men are laid in with quick, broad strokes of brown and grey. In the foreground a pale body lies sprawled on the churned ground among scattered debris. The Belvedere dates the panel only roughly, to around 1850 to 1860, and sets it apart from Pettenkofen's gentler camp scenes as harsh and austere.

It reached the museum in 1921, in the middle of Austria's postwar inflation, as a gift from Camillo Castiglioni, a banker who built one of the great fortunes of those years. That June it was shown in an exhibition of the gallery's acquisitions since 1918. The signature, just the surname, sits low in the corner of the bare earth.