The Casualty Transport I

Oxen haul a cart through mud that mirrors the stormy sky. On it a wounded man is propped up while a soldier bends over him, others push at the wheels or trudge alongside with rifles slung, and a woman in a wide straw hat, a flask at her hip, walks ahead beside the team. Pettenkofen signed and dated the small panel in 1853, the first of two pictures of this subject in the Belvedere.

It belonged to Oscar Bondy, a Jewish industrialist in Vienna whose apartment and collection the authorities sealed days after the Nazi annexation of 1938, and then to his widow Elisabeth. In 1949 it was sold at Kende Galleries in New York, spent 24 years in a private collection in Argentina, and returned to Vienna in 1973, when the museum bought it from the dealer Christian Nebehay.