The Difficult Journey. Original title: Transition to Bethlehem.

Uhde's 1890 'The Difficult Journey' — originally titled 'Transition to Bethlehem' — is one of his most characteristic works: a New Testament narrative scene transposed into the contemporary German landscape. The Holy Family's journey to Bethlehem becomes, in Uhde's hands, a German peasant family trudging through a winter landscape, the implied Christ-child or Virgin figure surrounded by the social reality of rural poverty. This approach — which made the divine familiar and the familiar sacred — was Uhde's signature contribution to religious painting and distinguished him sharply from both academic religious art and secular naturalism. The original title's reference to Bethlehem makes the biblical source explicit while the visible painting presents contemporary German poverty. The Bavarian State Painting Collections hold this as one of Uhde's most significant religious-social compositions, a work that condenses his entire artistic project into a single subject.

The outdoor winter setting would give Uhde's plein-air technique maximum expression: cold, diffuse light, a restricted palette of grays and whites with occasional warm accents, and the challenge of rendering figures convincingly in harsh weather. The contemporary peasant costume grounds the scene in social reality while the compositional echoes of traditional Flight into Egypt iconography create the theological resonance.