The Neighbours

Around 1900 the young painters of the Vienna Secession, the group around Gustav Klimt, went looking for ancestors and found one in Waldmüller, who had painted in bright outdoor daylight decades before them. They also pressed for a state gallery of modern art, and in 1903 the Moderne Galerie opened in the Lower Belvedere. This small panel had been bought for it the year before from Artaria, a Vienna firm of art dealers and music publishers, and it hung there from the first season. Waldmüller signed and dated it 1859. At a wattle fence, a young man and a girl in a red headscarf embrace, her raised arm hiding both their faces. Sun falls on his white sleeve and on the shingled roofs, and beyond the rosebush a second girl by the house wall is looking their way.