Friedrich Eckenfelder (6 March 1861 – 11 May 1938) was a German impressionist painter, best known for his portrayals of farm horses and for townscapes with a background of the Swabian Alps.

He was born and raised in modest circumstances, but his talent was discovered at an early age, so that he was able to receive training as a painter and later to enroll in the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

[citation needed] The fourteen-year-old boy was raised in Rottweil at his teacher's home as well as with the family of a senior forestry official named Junginger, one of Hölder's friends.

[citation needed] The younger Friedrich was deeply affected when he was eventually told that the man he had had a brotherly relationship with was in fact his father.

Paul Burmester, Georg Jauss, Richard Winternitz and Gino von Finetti moved in the same circle, as well as the "Schwabenburg" (Swabian castle) and the atelier of the painters Anton Braith and Christian Mali.

"[3] Eckenfelder also had contact with his family on excursions to the Dachau Marsh for painting En plein air or on autumn visits to Zügel's home town of Murrhardt.

Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria purchased his painting Pferde vor dem Pflug (Ploughing Horses) in 1888 and Eckenfelder was for the first time mentioned in the specialist press.

One critic remarked: "Friedrich Eckenfelder's Greys in the Pond prove that not everything needs to be painted in adherence with the Zügel school to have effect and power.

[8] In the 1890s, as more and more of his fellow artists were moving away from Munich, Eckenfelder decided to spend summers in Balingen and in the Swabian Alps.

[9] The collapse of the monarchy and his friend Zügel's dismissal from his post as director of the academy by the Bavarian Soviet Republic badly affected Eckenfelder, who was now in his sixties and in poor health.

[12] The Nazis respected Eckenfelder's work, whose motifs could easily be interpreted in terms of their blood and soil ideology.

[citation needed] On 9 December 1928 Eckenfelder had signed a joint election manifesto issued by the Sparerbund (Association of Savers) and the Nazi Party, although he was not a member of either organization.

[citation needed] In Württemberg at that time, the Nazis had a stronger conservative orientation and entered into coalitions on the local level with single-issue middle-class parties.

Friedrich Eckenfelder, whose monarchist worldview had been badly shaken by the Munich Soviet Republic and who was affected by the hyperinflation of the period, could certainly identify with the contents of the manifesto.

[13] In 1933, as Balingen's most prominent contemporary artist, he was commissioned by the town to produce paintings as gifts for the three newest honorary citizens: Hitler, Hindenburg and Murr.

He gave her a self-portrait and a landscape, Steinach mit Endingen und Plettenberg, and she referred to the picture as Bächlein meiner Liebe (Little brook of my love).

In the tradition of genre painting, the humans receive the same amount of attention as the animals: They rejoice in homecoming, toil at feeding time, or rest along with their horses.

Schnerring characterises his style as still searching, erratic and experimenting, but regards some of the paintings made during this phase as amongst his most successful.

Eckenfelder's ploughing horses become more monumental and infused with pathos, but by means of the use of light they remain a part of the landscape.

Eckenfelder complained about the bad quality of oil paints after the First World War; in particular, the yellow for warm summer light on the hide of a grey was no longer adequate for his requirements.

The motif is ill-positioned, waysides crop corners, streets and clods of earth are poorly executed, so that the animals with their firm lines stick out of the picture.

There are about 30 full views of Balingen, plus in addition pictures of market scenes, individual houses—these clearly recognisable as commissions—and the ensemble on the waterfront of the Eyach with the Zollernschloss, water tower and weir.

Many of the foreground locations in which Eckenfelder's horses are seen ploughing, were enclosed and made into housing estates after the Second World War.

To the south, the so-called Balinger Berge (Balingen mountains), prominently split by the valley of the Eyach, include the Lochen and Lochenhörnle (956 m), the Lochenstein (963 m), the Schafberg (1,000 m), and the Plettenberg (1,002 m).

These views can only be captured in pictures by compressing the horizontal and exaggerating the vertical; artistically, the challenge is to do this while keeping the mountains recognisable.

He exceeded 200 centimetres (6.6 ft) in width only in two landscapes, both of which hang today in the wedding room of the Balingen town hall.

In his catalogue of the artist's works, Schnerring abandons purely chronological listing for this category in order to distinguish the paintings from each other.

The quality of the portrayal declines beginning in 1922: "The teams of horses, initially integrated in colouring and composition, now gradually obstruct the landscape.