Around 1894, Zügel began to discover the "painter's paradise" around the small fishing village of Wörth on the Old Rhine near Karlsruhe, where he created numerous Impressionist landscapes and animal paintings with his students, the so-called Zügel School, during the summer months of his more than 20-year teaching career at the Karlsruhe and Munich art academies. After 1900, Zügel turned his full attention to plein-air painting, whereupon his works visibly gained momentum and dynamism. Zügel departed from the realistically descriptive painting style he had used at the beginning of his career and showed an astonishing painterly freedom, which was expressed in the broad, impasto strokes of paint applied with brush and pallet knife, broken up by large and small dabs. As an important animal painter, his real interest was less in the precise reproduction of animal anatomy and forms than in the moving and lively light in nature, which thus determines the pictorial events. Zügel's late works show an artist who remained true to an immediacy based on impressionistic looseness, which lives entirely from the powerful colors, right up to his last creative phase. [KT]