A Christmas Carol in Lucerne

By the 1880s, painters across central Switzerland were setting the region's rural customs down on canvas before they faded, and Hans Bachmann made a career of doing exactly that around Lucerne. This scene dates from 1887. Its German title says plainly what it shows, Weihnachtssingen im Kanton Luzern, Christmas singing in the canton of Lucerne: villagers gathered outdoors in the winter to sing carols. Bachmann worked in the careful, warmly finished manner collectors of the day liked, so the whole thing stays legible, the snow, the heavy coats, the faces caught mid-song. It hangs in Basel now under inventory number 14, still holding one Lucerne Christmas custom the way the countryside kept it in his lifetime.