When Hannes Binder finds and reads the diaries and documents of his grandmother, he also gets to know his great-grandfather. He wanted to become a painter, but his father, a comb maker pressured by the emerging industry, urges him to think it over carefully. The successful painter Koller, whom he meets plein air, also warns him about the hard life of an artist. The documents from his grandmother's desk inspire the young artist's imagination. He travels back to the past, to the nineteenth century, when his young great-grandfather loved art and a tavern daughter from Diessenhofen, at a time when industry was encroaching on craftsmanship and the emerging photography was threatening painting. He also recalls his own youth as an art student in the sixties, embarking on new horizons. Then came the new era in the form of computers, allowing anyone to create illustrations.