Around 1880, after his student years in Weimar and extensive travels to Rügen, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy, Karl Hagemeister returned to his home region around the lakes of the Havelland. In the seclusion of the untouched nature, he began to discover the motifs that would become so characteristic of his work. The lake landscape around Ferch on Lake Schwielow, criss-crossed by small boggy canals and creeks, offered him the opportunity to immerse himself in the meditative tranquillity of nature, producing intimate landscape impressions inspired by Impressionism and Paysage intime. With a palette of increasingly bright and delicate colors, he developed the tone from the evenly distributed light. His aspiration to move from a still-life view of nature to a touching depiction of the atmosphere of nature, repeatedly leds him deep into the thicket of the river landscape. He realized "that nature is not a still life, but a creative and permanently working organism", which he tried to capture in the changing light moods of an ever-changing impression that was subject to wind and weather. Interwoven with a fresh, luminous green alternating with delicate yellow dabs, Hagemeister shows a shore suffused with the warm golden tones of autumn in the gentle calm of the still waters. During the years in which he lived in seclusion in and with nature, the free and airy paintings he created on the banks of Lake Schwielow became his central works. Many of the locals owned a small boat, as did Hagemeister, in which he explored hidden places in the thicket of the woodland. This way he was able to get to the places that are so characteristic of his compositions, most of which were made "plein-air": Close-up views of dense reeds and grasses directly from the low barge, the painter's and thus the viewer's vantage point embedded in nature. [KT]