Solitude

This canvas entered the collection now held by the Belvedere in 1903, bought from the Hagenbund, a Viennese artists' society. The island it shows lay inside the same empire. Lokrum, Lacroma in the picture's old subtitle, sits just off Dubrovnik on the coast of Dalmatia, then an Austrian crown land, and Archduke Maximilian, the emperor's younger brother, had built a residence there in 1859. Mediz left all of that out. He painted the island's small salt lake, known as the Dead Sea, thought to have formed when a large cave collapsed and still fed by the sea through underground passages. Under the red cliff, at the waterline, a dark opening sits in the rock. Close up, the surface is built from small, almost Impressionist dabs of paint. From further back the same picture settles into clearly bounded planes of stone, water, pine and sky.