Vintage Outside Vienna With a View of Klosterneuburg, Mounts Leopoldsberg and Bisamberg, and Korneuburg

The Belvedere stresses how real this place is. Heideloff, who belongs to the circle of the Viennese landscape painter Johann Christian Brand, painted a particular stretch of country north of Vienna in 1779. The Leopoldsberg, with buildings on its summit, rises on the left, the Bisamberg answers it on the right, and across the Danube Korneuburg is a pale outline. On the slope, pickers bend among the vines, while on the path below a well-dressed party with dogs stops to look at the river, one man pointing. Wine was the living of these hills, and five years later Emperor Joseph II allowed growers to sell their own wine directly, the decree still cited as the start of Vienna's Heuriger taverns. Only one other painting by Heideloff has so far been identified in a public collection.