The Return of the Herd

Viennese painters of the 1840s competed in brilliant colour and ambitious composition, and pictures like this one, dated 1844, left many of Michael Neder's contemporaries puzzled, as the Belvedere puts it. The herd coming home to the farm is lined up almost like a frieze, the animals flat and side-on in a shallow strip of ground before the house wall, with little depth and only a few colours. A herdsman in a tall hat raises a long stick behind a black ox. Pigs trot along in front, and a goat heads for the stable, where a woman is already leading two cows through the dark doorway. Above them, cobs of maize hang drying from the wooden balcony, and a white cloth has been thrown over the rail beside them.