Fair Before a City Gate

The canvas carries neither signature nor date, so nobody knows exactly when Karl Josef Aigen painted it. Its later history is clearer. It is recorded in the imperial picture gallery from 1781, the year that collection opened to visitors in the Upper Belvedere. A crumbling gateway with a round tower rises at the left, and the fair spills out of it into open country. A rider on a white horse moves through the throng, dogs run between the groups of people, a man bends under a heavy basket, and a mountain fades into the haze behind. In 1922, after the monarchy had fallen, the Kunsthistorisches Museum handed the painting over to the Belvedere. In 2017 it was shown there in an exhibition on Maria Theresa and the arts, the empress in whose reign Aigen taught at the Vienna Academy.