Farmer's Wife from Ramsau at the Spinning Wheel

Around 1836 Eybl took a small sheet of paper, only 38 by 29 centimetres, and painted on it in oil an old woman from Ramsau, an Alpine farming village. The sheet was later mounted on a wooden panel. She sits squarely facing us in a battered green wing chair, with a spinning wheel at her side and a thread still running through her fingers from the bundle of fibre on the distaff. Nothing has been tidied for the painter. Her bodice is rubbed through and patched, and a rosary hangs from the chest behind the wheel, near a little jug of pink flowers. Eybl signed the study in the lower corner as Eibl, the spelling he used in these years. It stayed in private hands in Vienna until the Belvedere bought it from a Viennese dealer in 1955.