Around the turn of the century, Dachau became the most important Southern German artists' colony and a popular meeting place for landscape painters. As early as the 19th century, open-air painting found one of its origins here; the heyday of the Dachau artists' colony was reached from the 1880s, when the painters Adolf Hölzel (1853-1934), Arthur Langhammer (1854-1901) and Ludwig Dill (1848-1940) settled here permanently. The painters, who were friends, worked closely together, but also took different paths stylistically. Many other artists and writers followed to Dachau and in 1892 Hölzel founded his own private painting school.
