The painter Peter Schermuly created works of an artful reality whose meticulously detailed concreteness is the expression of pure painting. This catalogue raisonné makes accessible his entire oeuvre of oil paintings and sketches as well as wall designs. It presents an art that carved out space for itself contrary to all trends. Schermuly's mutable and original oeuvre led him out of an abstraction governed by visual rules and into the fascination of reality-inspired colour. The intensity of his gaze explored what the appearance of the world has to offer to a virtuoso colourist for a painting. He was interested not in recreation but in understanding the visible to develop colour phenomena suitable for painting. Profound knowledge of the history of the art of painting was for Schermuly a guarantee of his originality. The elaborately prepared and lavishly produced book presents an artist of rare distinction to the isms of the second half of the twentieth century.