Marcel Rieder was born in Thann in 1862. After the annexation, he had to, like other Alsatians, leave his native land. His parents chose to settle in Paris. At the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts, he was a student of the academician Alexandre Cabanel. Rieder would nevertheless develop a personal art far from the academicism of his beginnings, influenced in particular by the Danish Johansen whom he met in 1897.
"Since then," says the critic Marc Lenossos, "Marcel Rieder has remained the painter of nights and twilights, of that uncertain hour when day is no longer day and is not yet night... The hour at which, over the last half-century, candles, oil lamps, gas butterflies and electric bulbs are lit successively."
Our oil prepares the series of large canvases representing summer evenings on the banks of Annecy. On the reverse, in addition to the number that listed the work in the family archives, we find a preparation for another landscape, very close to the works executed in Villiers-sous-Grez. Rieder's works are preserved in many French, American and Hungarian museums.