The Grossglockner with the Pasterze Glacier

In July 1832 Archduke Johann, the emperor's brother, climbed to the Pasterze, the largest glacier in Austria, and took Thomas Ender with him. The painter's task, the Belvedere says, was to record the shape and look of the ice. He stood roughly where the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe terrace is today, named after Emperor Franz Joseph's visit in 1856, and looked up the valley toward the Grossglockner, the country's highest peak.

The glacier was then close to its greatest extent in recent centuries, which scientists place around 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age. It has shrunk ever since, and its lower tongue now loses about five metres of thickness a year. Ender packed the foreground with blue-grey crevasses, and in the lower right corner he wrote that he painted it from nature, in 1832.