The Broad Pine near the Brühl at Mödling

Long before this picture was painted in 1838, the old pine on the Anninger hill above Mödling, just south of Vienna, was a favourite goal for day-trippers. Schnorr von Carolsfeld belonged to the circle of the Nazarenes, painters drawn to Romantic religious subjects, yet here he records the ground almost like a surveyor, from the wooded hills to the flat Vienna Basin opening out behind them. Around the trunk he sets his people as if on a stage. Field workers rest with their bundles, a journeyman leans on his staff beneath the branches, and in the foreground a well-dressed couple gives alms to a beggar. By the 1990s the pine had grown unsafe, and it was cut down in January 1997. In 2002 its trunk was moved into the state museum of Lower Austria in St. Pölten.