Landschaft bei Ermatingen

Hans Thoma's 'Landscape near Ermatingen' (1886) depicts the countryside of the Swiss canton of Thurgau on the shore of Lake Constance — a landscape Thoma knew from his time in Switzerland. Ermatingen, a small town on the lake near Konstanz, offered him the combination of cultivated agricultural landscape, lake views, and the distant Swiss and German hills that were among his characteristic subjects. His Swiss landscapes maintain the warmth and directness of his Black Forest work while engaging a slightly more open, lakeside terrain.

Thoma renders the Thurgau landscape with his characteristic warm, naturalist handling — the agricultural scene depicted with direct observation and a palette that captures the warm tones of the central European summer or autumn. His compositional instincts organize the landscape through the relationship between cultivated foreground, middle-distance orchards or fields, and the distant lake or hills. Figures in the landscape provide human scale without dominating the scene.