Max Liebermann

1847 – 1935

German genre painter and etcher. He went to Paris in 1873, where he was impressed by the Barbizon school of painters. In Holland he was influenced by Frans Hals and Jozef Israëls. His early works were realistic, but beginning about 1890 he developed a style closely related to Impressionism. As leader of the Berlin Secession group (1898-1910), he was instrumental in bringing French Impressionism to Germany, where younger artists were already moving toward expressionism. Liebermann depicted the life of the working classes, landscapes, outdoor group studies, and painted more than 200 portraits. In the 1880s he found his subjects in the orphanages and asylums for the old in Amsterdam and among the peasants and urban labourers of Germany and the Netherlands. A secular Jew and one of his country's most honoured artists, he was president of the Prussian Academy of Arts (1920-32) during the Weimar Republic. In his last year, however, he was forbidden to paint by the Nazis and his works were removed from museums and private collections.

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