Christian Landenberger was one of the painters in Germany who became involved in Impressionist open-air painting at an early stage. After beginning his studies at the Stuttgart Art Academy, he continued at the Munich Art Academy from 1883 to 1885. Shortly afterwards, however, he dropped out of university and turned to a non-academic, direct approach to painting, in which he pursued new paths, particularly in landscape painting. Finally, in 1892, he would be a founding member of the Munich Secession and regularly showed works at the exhibitions until 1916. With the founding of a private painting school in 1895, this Impressionist influence also had impact on his students, such as Hermann Stenner, with whom he went on excursions into the great outdoors, especially into the idyllic Danube valley. One Impressionist motif that he repeatedly explored from 1893 onwards was bathing boys. Summer painting sojourns had repeatedly taken him to Lake Constance and Lake Ammersee, where the surroundings offered him the perfect conditions for the realization of light effects and the unspoiled unity of man and nature in his works. He also observed the natural movements and postures of the children without any artificiality. The surface of the water in particular allowed for an iridescent use of color, detached from the local color, which is applied in a loose and spontaneous style. Landenberger devoted himself both to the individual figure, as in "Bathing Boy on the Danube", which he integrates into a muted kaleidoscope of green, violet and ochre tones, and to the group, in which he embedded the figures in the summery space of air, water and warmth. For one of these motifs, "Sommerabend am See" (Summer Evening by the Lake, 1904, Neue Pinakothek, Munich), he was awarded a prize at the X. International Art Exhibition at the Glaspalast in Munich. The following year he was appointed professor at the Stuttgart Art Academy. The "Badenden Knaben", a motif to which Max Liebermann also devoted himself with great success in over 30 versions from the late 1890s onwards, is one of the central themes of German Impressionism and is therefore of central importance, largely due to Landenberger's artistic contribution. [KT]