Spring in the Prater

The Prater, once an imperial hunting ground on the Danube and by then Vienna's great public park, was where Tina Blau kept her studio. She usually pushed a handcart of paints through woods and meadows to work outdoors, but a canvas more than two metres high and nearly three wide had to be finished indoors. Blau painted the canvas for the 1882 International Exhibition at the Vienna Künstlerhaus. The trees are only just coming into leaf. Children wade in a shallow stream, a small green bridge crosses it further back, and on the path a lady under a parasol walks with a little girl. The jury first turned the picture down and let it in only after the painter Hans Makart spoke up. A year later it earned an honourable mention at the Paris Salon, and later writers called it the first Impressionist painting in Austrian art.