In his work, Charles Vetter, who studied at the Munich Art Academy from 1881, first in the drawing class and then in the landscape class, devoted himself most successfully to the motif of impressionist city views. After working in Merseburg, Leipzig and Dachau, he finally settled in Munich in 1893, where he made urban-architectural portraits from ever new angles. Historical views merge with contemporary ones. Kaufingerstraße, the central axis of downtown Munich, is one of the city’s oldest streets, and has been documented since the 13th century. Today a busy pedestrian zone and shopping mile, merchants built their representative houses there as early as in the Middle Ages. In the 19th century, large department stores began to take over. At the time the work was created, in which the view goes past the Michaelskirche on the left in the direction of Marienplatz, the tram tracks were still running through the street. However, war-related losses were responsible for the change in the cityscape, of which Vetter created an atmospheric impression here. In terms of composition, Vetter sought comparison with the impressionistic depictions of the boulevards of Paris by Claude Monet or by Lesser Ury’s Berlin scenes in which the streets are staged as the city’s lifelines. The light moods, here harmoniously captured in gray-blue tones of the sky reflected in the wet street in contrast to the warm ocher-colored house facades and the black of the trams and umbrellas, show the city as a constantly changing motif. [KT]