View of the Imperial Estate Emmersdorf and Schloss Rothenhof with Melk Monastery in the Background

In 1800 the office that managed the Habsburg family estates bought the lordship of Emmersdorf, on the north bank of the Danube opposite Melk, from the counts of Hoyos on behalf of Emperor Franz. A quarter of a century later Josef Rebell, by then in charge of the emperor's picture gallery in the Belvedere, painted the estate as working country. Two horses drag a plough across a brown field, and farm people rest in the shade of a big tree beside the track, one young man lifting his cup. Past a wayside shrine the land opens toward the village church, the towered house of Rothenhof, and on the far ridge the long white front of Melk Abbey. The small canvas, signed and dated 1826, stayed in imperial hands until it passed from the Kunsthistorisches Museum to the Belvedere in 1954.