Estanque de la aldea en Etzenhausen - Idilio aldeano

In the summer of 1879 Liebermann showed The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple at the international exhibition in Munich's Glass Palace, and it went badly for him. He had painted Jesus as an ordinary barefoot boy arguing with the scholars, the critics turned on the picture, and part of the attack on its 31-year-old painter was openly antisemitic. On the advice of Franz von Lenbach, the most successful portraitist in Munich, he left the city for Etzenhausen, a village outside Dachau where a small colony of painters worked. This is what came out of that summer. The title calls it a village pond, though what he painted is the ford where the Webelsbach stream crosses the village, with children bathing and women rinsing dishes at the edge of the water. He made the studies out of doors and assembled the picture in his Munich studio that autumn. Dachau has since marked a path through Etzenhausen showing where the painters set up.