The morning of the Feast of Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi falls in late spring, and in Catholic Austria it was the morning the parish carried the consecrated host through the streets in procession. Children walked in it, girls in white with wreaths in their hair, boys holding candles. Waldmüller painted the minutes before it sets off. A boy with a decorated candle and a sheet of hymns turns back, beaming, while a girl on the ground holds out a freshly woven wreath to him. Morning sun catches the girls in their best dresses. Not every child here is going. Off to one side stand poorer children, several of them seen only from behind, who will not walk in the procession. The panel was painted in 1857, and since 1912 it has hung in the Belvedere on loan from the society of the gallery's friends.