Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses
Hans Thoma
Hans Thoma the artist
Public’s favourite
In Hans Thoma’s home region of Baden, no other painting by this artist is as well-known and, indeed, as much loved as his large Kinderreigen (Children Dancing in a Ring). Reproductions not only decorate innumerable living rooms, but also the walls of nursery schools and classrooms.
Composition with many qualities
This ranks among Thoma’s most outstanding paintings in terms of its composition, the interaction of the figures, their setting in the landscape, their features, and the material quality of their garments.
Although the countryside in this idyllic scene strongly evokes the south-west of Germany, it may be Thoma’s own invention, convincingly combining impressions from Bernau, his home town in the Black Forest, the Rhine Valley near Säckingen, and a distant view of the Alps.
An idyll with limits
On a meadow, six young girls and one boy are holding hands and dancing in a circle. Some have their mouths open as they sing a ring-a-ring o’ roses song as they dance.
Thoma’s celebration of childhood resonates in the daisies in the grass and the first signs of green on the poplars along the river as nature awakens in spring. Yet this idealised pastoral scene is not free from presentiments of what may come – the snow-covered peaks in the background allude to the possible rigours of life.
The children’s faces are not entirely carefree either. Rather than smiling joyfully, some of them look serious, even pensive.
Role models
Hans Thoma painted his Kinderreigen in 1872 during the years he lived in Munich. At that time, he moved in circles with such fellow artists as Arnold Böcklin, Albert Lang, Wilhelm Leibl, Ernst Sattler, Carl Schuch and Wilhelm Trübner. In 1872, Schuch and Trübner also explored the topic of childhood in genre painting.
They both painted a picture entitled Junge am Schrank (Der erste Versuch) (Boy at the Sideboard (The first try) showing a boy put to the test in his first encounter with alcohol. In a similar way, Trübner’s painting Balgende Buben (Scuffling Boys) from the same year finds a parallel in Thoma’s Raufende Buben (Brawling Boys).
In these works, a boy’s childhood is portrayed as a wild game, pushing the boundaries in a transgressive act, physically challenging others and negotiating positions in the group’s hierarchy. Fighting as a means to establish a dominance hierarchy could also explain why, unlike Trübner, Thoma chose a vertical format for his boys brawling, a composition as compact as it is complex.
In contrast, with its rectangular format dedicated primarily to young girls, his Kinderreigen focuses on harmonious play, togetherness and order. Could this be why the group’s only boy looks slightly strained as he frowns?
In whispers, the norms of the game are passed on to the youngest children in the circle. Yet even though the children are of mixed ages with some playing the game better than others, they still seem to meet each other on eye level.
Written sources on this work offer no indication of whether Thoma intended such a gender-specific reading of his painting. Nonetheless, given the dominant ascription of codes of conduct for boys and girls, he may well have expected such an interpretation.
First combined in the studio
When the painting was shown in the Dresden art exhibition in 1895, the art historian Paul Schumann wrote a particularly direct if somewhat arbitrary critique in Die Kunst für Alle magazine: “Hans Thoma is less well represented with his Kinderreigen as the children do not appear to be fully absorbed in their game.”
Thoma worked up the painting in his studio from individual figural studies. Clearly, though, he left nothing to chance in the details, as is only too apparent from the careful arrangement of the various positions of naked feet and the well-placed raised or lowered hands.
The play of light similarly points to the composition being developed step-by-step during the painting process. Rather than falling naturally, the light seems to illuminate the group from the front. To an extent, Thoma’s idiosyncratic use of light lends the scene an unreal quality, further enhanced by the quizzical upward gaze of the tall girl in the foreground.
Evidently Schumann, who subscribed to völkisch ethno-national views, found this ambivalence in the painting’s message hard to swallow. At that time, a wide audience was familiar with, for example, the illustrations for the Kinderengel. Spruchbüchlein für fromme Kinder (Children’s Angel. A little book of maxims for good children), first published in Dresden in 1858.
These were from woodcuts after romantic drawings by Ludwig Richter and Carl Peschel. The book also contained Martin Luther’s Letter to his Little Son Hans decorated illustrated with a celestial children’s circle dance – a depiction of childish piety beyond dispute or doubt.
A picture of childhood in its day
Thoma’s break with the expectation that a roundelay is a haven of unbridled joy may well signal precisely the quality of his painting. The circle dance motif was to be taken up by late 19th- and early 20th-century artists such as Ludwig Knaus and Arnold Böcklin, or August Roth who included a watching skeleton.
For an age critically engaging with educational content and methods, the circle dance was an appropriate topos. From the mid-1880s at the latest, Thoma himself tended to favour the ideals of the progressive educational movement, still new at that time, which he anticipated in his Kinderreigen painting.
In 1902, when Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden, celebrated the Golden Jubilee of his reign, Hans Thoma donated the work to the Grand Ducal Art Gallery, of which he was the director.
Basic data
| Title | Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses |
|---|---|
| Artist | Hans Thoma |
| Date | 1872 |
| Measurements Plastic | H 102cm W 88cm |
| Material | Oil on canvas |