This print is named for the German artists’ colony outside of Essen though it does not, in fact, represent the location. Instead, the buildings depicted are unknown; the image comes from a photograph taken by the artist through the window of a moving train. Richter started using his own photographs as source material for his paintings in 1965. Three years later, he began working on his series of Townscapes, Landscapes, Clouds, Mountains, Seascapes, Windows, and Shadow Paintings followed by the official beginning of his encyclopedic project Atlas, which is ongoing and aims to compile all of the artist’s source material beginning with 1962, the year in which the first photo painting was produced.