Friedrich Gauermann's painting of a waterfowl hunt on Lake Chiemsee sold for €130,000 at Dorotheum's 19th Century Paintings sale in Vienna on 22 October 2026. The oil on panel, measuring 84 by 73 centimetres, was one of 176 lots in the evening sale at the Palais Dorotheum, held as part of the house's autumn Classic Week.

The picture was executed in 1849 for Rudolf Edler von Arthaber, a textile manufacturer, entrepreneur and patron who was one of the most important supporters of Viennese artistic life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Gauermann noted in his diary on 12 September 1849 that he had begun the painting of the heron that Arthaber had commissioned. The work later passed through a private collection in Budapest until 1973, appeared at Neumeister in Munich in 1980, and was sold at Sotheby's in London in 2001 before returning to Austria.

Gauermann, who lived from 1807 to 1862, is regarded as one of the most significant landscape and animal painters of nineteenth-century Austrian art. Trained at first by his father, Jacob Gauermann, he belonged to the first generation of Austrian artists to break away from academic history painting and treat landscape as an independent subject. Hunting scenes, pastoral views and animals in combat became his trademark, built on countless studies made on long walks through the mountains of Styria, Tyrol and the Salzkammergut.

In this picture, a hunter stands beside his saddled horse on a storm-tossed lakeshore, one dog resting at his feet while two others guard the killed prey, one with its head resting on the wing of a dead heron. The monumental cloudy sky and shifting light show Gauermann working at full stretch for a patron whose own collection, more than one hundred works including pictures by Amerling, Waldmüller and Danhauser, was regarded as one of the outstanding private collections of the Viennese Biedermeier period.