Hans Thoma (October 2, 1839 – November 7, 1924) was a German painter. He was born in Bernau in the Black Forest, Germany. Having started life as a painter of clock faces, he entered in 1859 the Karlsruhe Academy, where he studied under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig des Coudres.

He subsequently studied and worked, with but indifferent success, in Düsseldorf, Paris, Italy, Munich and Frankfurt, until his reputation became firmly established as the result of an exhibition of some thirty of his paintings in Munich. He died in Karlsruhe in 1924 at the age of 85.

In spite of his studies under various masters, his art has little in common with modern ideas, and is formed partly by his early impressions of the simple idyllic lif...