View over Houses in the Suburbs of Vienna (Beatrixgasse)

In 1839, when he painted this panel, Adalbert Stifter was not yet known as a writer. That year he took part in an exhibition at the Vienna Academy with five paintings, among them views of the Beatrixgasse, a street in the Landstraße suburb where he lived. His first story, The Condor, came out in a Vienna magazine only in April 1840. This view looks across the backs of houses. There are bare fire walls, chimneys, red and green roofs, and on the right a tall gable with cracked, flaking plaster. Below lies an overgrown garden with a wooden shed, and far beyond the roofs a faint line of hills. Stifter signed and dated it in the lower right corner. A smaller view of the same street, painted on cardboard that same year, belongs to the Wien Museum.