#moon

He painted this same set-up at least three times, from what I can find, swapping a woman in for one of the men in a later go. There's a story that he looked at the two of them in their old-fashioned German coats and said they were up to demagogic intrigues — supposedly a joke about how that kind of dress had become politically suspect to the authorities at the time.

He was a toll clerk who painted on his days off, and the critics of his day mostly treated him as a joke. From what I've read he tried to sell this one to the mayor of his home town, who wasn't interested, and it then dropped out of sight for years before a dealer turned it up again in the 1920s.