Bivouac of Russian Soldiers

In 1849 the young emperor Franz Joseph could not put down the Hungarian uprising alone, so Tsar Nicholas I sent more than 100,000 Russian troops. On 13 August the main Hungarian army surrendered to them at Világos. Pettenkofen had followed the Austrian army through that war as a war artist, though nobody knows why, and in 1852 he signed and dated this small board with a scene that has no fighting in it.

Russian soldiers in peaked caps camp on a sandy rise above a pool. One man sits at the edge with his feet in the water, a few others gather by a row of cooking pots, and behind them horses stand among a loaded wagon, piled sacks and the smoke of a fire. The Belvedere places it entirely in the tradition of the Biedermeier realism of Vienna before 1848.