On the Gaisalm

In 1826 the Munich academy closed its class in landscape painting. History painting was in favour under the new director, Peter von Cornelius, and Wilhelm von Kobell, who had taught landscape there since 1814, retired at the age of 60. This small canvas, signed at the lower right Wilhelm Kobell 1828, was painted two years later and is barely 37 centimetres high. Gais is the Bavarian word for a goat, and an Alm is a high pasture where herds spend the summer. The museum's catalogue tags the picture with goats, animals and a mountain. In the years that followed, Kobell's scenes of the Bavarian countryside grew more varied, with country people as their main figures, and he went on painting them into his eighties.