Hans Bachmann

Hans Bachmann was a painter of Swiss country life. Born in the village of Winikon in 1852, he trained from 1870 at the Düsseldorf academy in Germany, then a magnet for painters who liked their scenes carefully finished and full of local detail.

He spent his career on the customs, costumes and mountain light of central Switzerland around Lucerne, where he settled and died in 1917. The picture here, from 1887, shows carol singers in Lucerne at Christmas, the kind of warm, anecdotal genre scene that made his name at home.