Due to his numerous landscapes, Thoma may well be considered a painter of the idyll. In a strange way, these works always appear as both a depiction of an actual place and an ideal landscape sprung entirely from imagination - thus they are part of a of literature and art genre dedicated to the depiction of utopias. For the scenery in his works, Thoma drew on the impressions he was able to gather during his career, most importantly the lovely Black Forest valleys of his homeland, to which he repeatedly returned to paint in the summer months during his student days in the 1860s. On a trip to Paris in the spring of 1868, he became acquainted with the harmonious landscapes of French Classicism, as well as Gustave Courbet's landscapes, which were characterized by the direct view of Realism. A stay in Italy, which took him as far as Rome, left a lasting impression, particularly Renaissance art in Florence, with its return to the antique formal ideal and humanistic world view. Thoma would return to Italy five more times until 1905, his stays in Florence with Hildebrand and on Lago di Garda with Henry Thode, friend and patron of Thoma and director of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in 1899, were particularly influential. These impressions, characterized by antique grandeur and pastoral idyll, were groundbreaking for his German landscapes which emanate the same atmosphere while they show a different nature. The focus is on the nostalgic longing for a golden age that can be realized and depicted in art, a harmonious and universal interplay of nature, art and man. Thoma spent the summer of 1900 in Kronberg im Taunus, where he had already worked for a time with the Kronberg painters' colony around 1880. From 1877-1899 he lived in Frankfurt, where he found the motifs for his landscapes. In 1899 he was appointed director of the Karlsruher Galerie and professor at the art school. The present scene was painted in the summer of 1901, shortly before his wife's death, and depicts a landscape on the river Nidda north of Frankfurt, a place that had a lasting impression on him. What is so characteristic of late works from his late creative period is the graphic composition with strict contours, sparsely applied and glazed colors, that are all the more brighter and more luminoust. Thoma once again shows the unreal light that fills everything and, particularly through the drawing, an almost surreal clarity, as if in a daydream. Nature is reflected crystal clear in the surface of the water in front of the slender poplars, a goat grazes in the foreground, the children sit in the shade under a bush, while the flower-picking cild looks up as if surprised by the painter. In th epresent work Thoma once again demonstrates his unique ability to achieve the greatest possible atmospheric content with a reduced narrative pictorial content. [KT]