Anton Karinger first devoted himself to landscape painting at the academy in Vienna, going on to study portraits in Munich. He decided to embark upon a military career, enlisting as an officer in the Austrian army and serving from 1845 to 1861 in Italy, Dalmatia, and Montenegro. In his spare time, he depicted the landscapes he visited and the traditional dress of the people living there. He moved to Ljubljana in 1861 and focused on painting. Here, he staged many artistic exhibits, donating a painting to every one of them.
His portrayals of vivid lakes, rivers, and mountains place Karinger among the romantic landscape painters. Warm hues dominate his palette, as he most often depicted the Carniolan landscape ablaze in light shining from the south.
In his work Bled, a willow and other mighty trees dominate the foreground. Crowned at the top with a silhouette of Bled Castle, this dark scenery served as a springboard towards the lighter tones in the background. In a wooden boat along the lake’s shores sits a figure, clearly not a fisherman but an ordinary man, puffing peacefully on a pipe under his hat in the boat’s aft section. The castle rising above the lake couples with the clouds to shade the water’s surface, while Triglav’s mighty peak is visible over the horizon in the background. This relatively dark scene is lightened up by the blue sky and its billowing clouds.
The colored rockfaces continue from the foreground, which is painted in darker tones, into the background, before coalescing into a distinctly bright outline of our tallest mountain. The painter realized his image of Bled in the romantic expressionism of the middle of the 19th century.