In the visual arts, nature has never been a simple image, but has always had its own discourses, iconographies, myths and references, be it as a landscape, in an animal painting or in a nude depiction. This is also the case with Max and Katharina Renneisen. In their work, both direct their gaze to France, which in art history is a centre of direct observation of nature. They take journeys to the Loue Valley, to the forest of Fontainebleau and to the coast of Étretat as an occasion to seek out the charged motifs of the painters of art history, first and foremost Gustave Courbet, with plate camera and sketchpad and to incorporate them into their own pictorial world, not without playful and serious references to these art greats.