Potato Field near Wessling, Upper Bavaria

In 1876 Wilhelm Trübner, then 25, was painting around Weßling, a village with a small lake west of Munich, and at Bernried on Lake Starnberg. That year's work did not go down well. His landscapes of Weßling and Bernried, together with a portrait of his friend the painter Carl Schuch, were turned away by Munich's art world, and his biographers say the rejection hit him hard. From 1877 he moved for a time to mythological and religious subjects. This canvas belongs to that year of landscapes, signed and dated at the lower left W. Trübner 1876. A potato field is about as plain a subject as a landscape can have, and the museum's catalogue notes a horse and a rider in it, whom it identifies as a soldier. The city of Munich bought the picture in 1931.