The Lake Vorderer Langbathsee with the Höllengebirge Mountains

Long before painters came to this valley, it worked for salt. When the saltworks at Ebensee on Lake Traun opened in 1604, the forests around the Langbath lakes were given over to firewood for boiling brine, and by 1607 a wooden dam there let the cut logs be floated down towards the pans. Friedrich Gauermann painted the nearer of the two lakes between 1828 and 1830, when he was in his early twenties, in oil on a sheet of paper that is now mounted on canvas. Above the water rise the pale limestone cliffs of the Höllengebirge, the "Hell Mountains", in warm light. A white house stands on the far shore. Right in the foreground, beside a tall trunk, he painted a cut tree stump.