Forest River with Bridge

Until his death in 1884, the painter Hans Makart set the tone in Vienna with vast, crowded canvases full of costume and pageant. The picture Marie Egner painted around 1885 looks nothing like that. Here a brown woodland stream runs shallow over stones under a plain timber bridge, with bushes crowding the banks and a pale, clouded sky above. There are no figures in it and no story. In those years she spent her summers painting out of doors in Lower Austria with the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler and his circle, and an ordinary corner of countryside in one particular light was what they went looking for. In the foreground she laid the reflected sky into the water in quick strokes of light between the dark stones. Her signature, M. Egner, sits in the lower left corner.