The Van Gogh exhibition held at Augarten Palace concluded smoothly without any incidents.
Since the invitees were all members of high society related to Theresian Academy or Karl’s parents, the atmosphere could hardly have been poor.
Even the most cantankerous nobles would strive to maintain their dignity at an exhibition salon hosted by a young member of the imperial family.
Furthermore, this was an exhibition of works held in a palace under the name of the Habsburg Family; who would dare to lose their manners?
In such a setting where upbringing and lineage were of the utmost importance, the guests behaved with propriety, maintaining their networks and exchanging pleasantries while admiring the paintings.
Incidentally, this also unexpectedly became an informal stage for re-evaluating the deceased Dutch painter and his works.
In fact, it seemed some truly felt something from Van Gogh’s intense brushstrokes and colors; many elegantly dressed gentlemen and ladies lingered in the exhibition hall for a long time, discussing in low voices.
After all, European high society is deeply connected to the concept of ‘artistic refinement,’ and there was no shortage of people with a genuine eye for it.
But as Karl stood to the side looking on, he really didn’t feel much of anything, other than knowing these paintings would be worth a fortune in the future.
Did those people truly feel Van Gogh’s unique style and the unconventional soul behind it?
Karl could only choose to believe so.
After all, even in the twenty-first century of his previous life, Mr.
Vincent van Gogh was still hailed as an immortal master of art.
Entering the vision of Vienna’s high society slightly earlier than in the original history could hardly change the status and power of the works themselves.
The exhibition’s reputation was excellent; based on this single salon held within a Habsburg palace, the potential value of the hundreds of works left by Van Gogh within the art world was likely to soar.
“Karl, thank you for your hard work.”
After the exhibition ended, his mother, Maria Josepha, gently stroked Karl’s head and praised him warmly.
In truth, rather than Karl, the one who had truly been busy and working hard was Madame Johanna, who had traveled from the Netherlands, though the starting point of everything had indeed been because of Karl.
His mother also believed that regardless of the scale, all of this would become valuable experience in her son’s growth.
The improvement in his image was an additional bonus.
Presenting himself as a royal ‘patron of the arts’ at such a young age was, by any measure, beneficial and without drawback in high society circles.
After all, in Vienna, Austria, unrecognized artists were already too numerous to count.
However, in Karl’s view, the success of the exhibition itself was not what was truly important.
At least for now, this Van Gogh exhibition had not brought him any immediate, tangible benefits.
What Karl was truly focused on was actually something else.
“Your Highness, this exhibition was very successful; it is truly worth celebrating.”
“But I didn’t actually do anything special, did I?” Karl turned his head and responded with feigned innocence.
“Your Highness was willing to lend the family palace and personally invite so many important guests; how can such merit and influence be called small?”
Standing beside Karl with a bright smile was a handsome man in his twenties.
His name was Otto Tressler, a somewhat famous theater actor in Vienna, a friend of Karl’s mother Maria Josepha, and, to some extent, Karl’s newly developed business partner.
To explain this man’s background, one must take a slight detour and start with the recent situation of Karl’s father, Archduke Otto.
Karl’s father possessed Augarten Palace and a generous royal annuity, living luxuriously; he certainly had the capital to be a libertine, and on the surface, he indeed seemed like an out-and-out playboy.
Since the family moved to Vienna, he had changed almost not at all.
He remained addicted to alcohol and left a trail of romantic debts everywhere; perhaps one day another half-brother or half-sister would suddenly appear.
In short, in the imperial capital—a vanity fair with eyes everywhere—Archduke Otto’s dissolute behavior could not fail to spread, eventually reaching the ears of the elderly Emperor in Schönbrunn Palace.
Emperor Franz Joseph I himself knew very well what a lonely and embarrassing feeling it was to have a spouse who was indifferent to oneself.
His wife, Empress Elisabeth (Sisi), had long ago abandoned all court duties to travel the world year-round, so the Emperor naturally felt a certain sympathetic concern for Maria Josepha, who was in a similarly awkward position.
However, even as the Emperor ruling the Empire, he could not simply dispose of his adult nephew at will, nor was it easy to directly intervene in the marital relationship of his brother’s household.
Besides, this was already the end of the nineteenth century, and such behavior among the nobility was hardly an isolated case.
Perhaps out of some pity and a desire to compensate his sister-in-law for her unhappy marriage, the Emperor had sent Otto Tressler—a young, handsome male actor—in a rather subtle manner to be a friend who could occasionally chat with Maria Josepha to relieve her boredom.
If an outsider who didn’t know the internal details heard of this arrangement, they might doubt if they had misheard.
But it was true.
A thirty-something princess of the Saxon royal house and a married noblewoman, with a handsome theater actor in his early twenties.
Oh, just looking at them from afar felt full of topicality and heat.
In such a scene, almost anyone would subconsciously let their imagination run wild, wouldn’t they?
Even the most pure-minded person, faced with such a combination, would find it hard not to harbor some ambiguous suspicions.
In Karl’s view, there was no such thing as pure friendship between a man and a woman; at least, he didn’t quite believe in it.
But when he actually observed them, he found he might have been overthinking.
His mother Maria Josepha’s noble royal blood and upbringing seemed to have truly limited her and the non-noble Otto Tressler within the bounds of a polite and distant friendship.
What surprised Karl even more was that his father, seeing Tressler’s frequent visits, didn’t mind in the slightest and even seemed pleased with the arrangement.
One could even say that Archduke Otto was quite happy to have someone who could keep his wife occupied so she wouldn’t bother him.
It was truly a jaw-dropping noble family.
In any case, from Karl’s observations, the relationship between his mother and Otto Tressler was indeed just like friends discussing worldly affairs.
In a word, they were really just friends.
It seemed he, with his wild thoughts, really needed to reflect on himself…
In fact, Mr.
Tressler, who had been indirectly sent by the Emperor, became familiar with the young Highness Karl even faster than with Karl’s mother.
They became close starting from a bit of casual chatter.
“Has Your Highness seen a ‘movie’?
It’s a new thing coming from Paris and London lately; photographs actually move, it’s truly incredible.”
The topic was cinema.
And for Karl, this was also a word that brought quite a bit of anticipation.
…
Being a member of the imperial family, his range of activity was limited, and it was impossible to know all the new things in the world.
Karl traveled daily between Augarten Palace and Theresian Academy, and the external information he could actively access was actually not much.
Otto Tressler, however, was someone who could bring many interesting pieces of news.
Through him, Karl learned what plays the actors in Vienna were currently rehearsing and also gained a general understanding of how far cinema had developed in Europe at that time.
At this time, cinema was not even at the stage of a toddler learning to walk; it couldn’t even be considered a newly born infant.
It was an era of short films less than a minute long, nothing more than wonderful moving photographs, simple in content, yet marvelously called ‘movies’ by people.
It was the period when moving images had just appeared; the Lumière brothers’ screenings were still a novelty, and audiences mostly marveled at the miracle of the ‘image moving’ itself, rather than the content.
And Karl knew all too well what immense power of dissemination and influence such a thing would possess in the future.
Thus, even if just as a hobby, he wanted to leave some mark of his own at the beginning of this visual history.
This was not a difficult task.
Movie cameras and projection equipment could be bought with money from France or England, and Augarten Palace itself could be used as the filming location.
After all, Karl’s home had plenty of empty rooms and beautiful gardens.
The ready-made actor would be the curious Tressler, and other miscellaneous tasks like carrying things and lighting could be handled by reliable servants.
It wasn’t as if he were trying to film a grand epic of over two hours.
Thinking about how the movies currently on the market weren’t even a minute long, this instead seemed incredibly easy.
Soon, a short family film imitating a comedic style, starring Tressler with the Augarten Palace gardens and corridors as a backdrop, was completed; its duration barely exceeded one minute.
When this first experimental film was screened for a small circle of relatives and friends, the response was even better than Karl had imagined.
“Your Highness, truly an ingenious idea,” Tressler marveled.
“Just for this little thing?”
“I have never seen a movie using this technique; you let the character’s face occupy the entire screen, that kind of impact…”
Even the sweetest flattery is better left unsaid if it goes too far.
It was just a simple use of a close-up shot; to be praised so much, Karl would hardly let it go to his head.
However, he was still somewhat happy in his heart, as he had at least left even a tiny mark on the history of cinema.
Perhaps, this could very well become one of the earliest films in cinema history to consciously employ a close-up shot.
In an era where cinema was still in a stage of pure technical curiosity and documentary exploration, almost no one thought systematically about cinematic language; for someone to realize that zooming in on a character’s face could strengthen emotional or dramatic effects was, in itself, ahead of the times.
Even if it wasn’t the ‘earliest,’ would an early film filmed at a famous palace, starring a well-known Viennese actor and a young Habsburg royal, be easily forgotten by history?
Karl thought he should find a safe place to properly hide the master film.
It might seem trivial now, but in the future, it could be more expensive than ordinary antique treasures.
When cinema becomes a popular art and early film copies are revered as precious historical materials by film historians, such an image would inevitably be seen by posterity as evidence of the germination of civilization and art.