Arrival of a Train at the Northwest Station in Vienna

In the 1870s Vienna was growing fast, and much of the new population arrived by rail. The Northwestern Station shown here opened in 1872, with trains to Bohemia and on to Dresden and Berlin. People from Bohemia came to work in the city's brickyards or as housemaids, and Karger put them in the same crowd as the well-to-do. Near the locomotive a woman in a full red dress stands with a little girl and a dog. Men in top hats mix with travellers carrying bundles. The Belvedere calls this the only known painting of the inside of a Viennese railway terminus from those years. It is signed at the lower right, Carl Karger, Munich 1875, and the imperial gallery bought it that year at the Künstlerhaus exhibition. The station building was badly damaged at the end of the Second World War and taken down from 1952.