Kinder Mit Ziegenherd by Hans Thoma

Kinder Mit Ziegenherd 1916

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Copyright: Public Domain: Artvee

Hans Thoma made this idyllic painting of children with a goat herd, but when, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a scene bathed in soft light, with layers of delicate brushstrokes building up this peaceful, pastoral vision. It's that kind of painting where you feel like you could step right into it. You can almost feel the cool of the rock on your skin, the wind in the trees, hear the baaing of the goats. What strikes me, though, is the way Thoma uses color, building it up slowly, glazing the surface. I get a sense of process, like a long exhale, but with the details still present, like in the way that he renders the water trickling over the rocks in the lower-left corner of the painting. The goats, too, have this very clear presence, but their forms are quite simple. Maybe Thoma was looking at the work of Jean-François Millet, with that sense of a connection to nature, and the dignity of simple life. It makes you think about what "reality" really means.

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