The Oat Field

The Oat Field (Das Haferfeld) is an oil on canvas painted in 1906 by the Austrian landscape painter Adolf Kaufmann; it belongs to the Belvedere in Vienna (inventory number 769).

Kaufmann (1848–1916), born in Austrian Silesia, was largely self-taught before completing his training in France with the animal painter Émile van Marcke. He lived by turns in Paris, Berlin, Düsseldorf and Munich, travelled widely in Europe and the Middle East, and settled in Vienna in 1890. His landscapes show the influence of the Barbizon school and of the French paysage intime, both of which he encountered in the 1870s. He showed regularly at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna, the Glaspalast in Munich and the Great Berlin Art Exhibition, became a full member of the Künstlerhaus in 1909, and also signed many pictures with pseudonyms, most often A. Guyot in France.

The painting is a late work, made when Kaufmann was in his late fifties. Instead of a broad vista it takes a close, low view of an ordinary field: a band of ripening oats sweeps diagonally across a grassy slope, edged by a strip of mown green where white and red wild flowers grow, while a dark mass of deciduous and coniferous trees closes off the right side beneath a cloudy summer sky. The canvas measures 74.5 by 111 cm and is signed and dated 'A. Kaufmann 1906' at lower left.

According to the Belvedere's collection record, the picture was purchased at the Vienna Künstlerhaus in 1906, the year it was painted. It was later included in the museum's exhibition Kunst in Wien um 1900 (Art in Vienna around 1900), held from 22 May to 26 October 1987, and is currently not on display.