When you drive through the fertile landscapes of the Wetterau and suddenly stop wondering why so many good things come from this beautiful area at our weekly markets.
Or when you see the river lying in front of you in the direction of the Rhine, literally like a painting.
Then the pictures of nature lie under and over the pictures that mainly regional painters of the 19th century have left us.
Hommages to the landscape hang everywhere in Rhein-Main, in Kronberg, of course, because of the painters' colony, in the Giersch Museum of the Goethe University, which before it was made available was entirely dedicated to regional painting of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
And if you leave the metropolitan region and drive south, where the Spessart folds out in gradations of green, in midsummer, when the light is clear and the air is still a bit hazy, then it's easy to indulge in the picturesque.
Very far away.
Suddenly a flock of crows flies up and you think: van Gogh!
The black birds soar high over the yellow field.
But before all the raving gets too much, let us remind ourselves that before us lie not billowing wheat, but stubbles of harvested barley.
And then our eyes fall on a crooked sign that has apparently been tousled a bit by the combine harvester.
Back to the real.
Where until recently the barley was swaying picturesquely in the summer wind, the local brewery announces: "Your beer grows here!"