In 1869 Heinrich von Zügel came to Munich and attended the sensational international exhibition at the Glass Palace, where Gustave Courbet and Constant Troyon, among others, were celebrated as important representatives of a new realism. In the face of these new influences, Anton Braith's animal paintings in particular became a model for him, and he would eventually succeed him as the most successful German animal painter. With his rural animal motifs, Zügel quickly established himself among buyers. Many of his paintings were created on the Wolkenhof farm in Murrhardt, north-east of Stuttgart, which he acquired in 1883 and which he had set up as a studio farm with animals. Numerous impressionistic sheep motifs characterized by the free impasto painting style were made there. Objectivity is thus almost completely dissolved and the work becomes a painterly event of light and color. Especially in his late works, Zügel achieved a painterly freedom that testifies to years of preoccupation with light, nature and, above all, with the most characteristic of his motifs, the herds of sheep. Like many of his contemporaries, Zügel consolidated his means of expression in his late work. The narrative element gave way to a harmonization of the composition. The color scheme became more balanced and the motifs calmer. He put main focus on the all-dissolving light that determines the pictorial event. Zügel's late works show an artist who remained true to plein-air painting that entirely lives on a delicate colorfulness right up to his last creative phase. [KT]