Works by Lovis Corinth

Lovis Corinth, a German painter and printmaker, began as a naturalist and loosened his style after a stroke in 1911; his subjects included himself, his family and, from about 1919, the Walchensee.

He made a habit of painting a self-portrait every year on his birthday. In Self-portrait with Skeleton of 1896 he appears, smoothly modelled, beside a skeleton hung from a hook, before a big window with roofs and chimneys behind. Ludwig von Löfftz, his teacher at the Munich academy, had encouraged this early realism. By Self-Portrait in Straw Hat of 1923 the face is built from heavy, broken strokes, and a lake and hills are laid in with a few sweeps.

In December 1911 a stroke partly paralysed his left side; within a year, helped by his wife, he had taken up the brush again in his right hand. Around 1919 landscapes took a large place in his work, painted at the Walchensee, an Alpine lake in Bavaria where he had a house. Walchensee, Yellow Meadow of 1921 puts a yellow slope in front of red roofs and scrubs in the water and mountains with blue and violet.

He married his first student, Charlotte Berend, and family life became a main subject; Wilhelmine mit Ball shows their daughter in 1915 in a broad hat, a ball in her lap. All his woodcuts date from 1919 to 1924, and in The Expulsion from Paradise of 1919 Adam, Eve and the winged angel are cut in rough white lines on black. Paintings lead below and prints follow; portraits and figures outnumber landscapes, and the 1910s are the best represented decade.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, National Gallery of Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, Lenbachhaus, Bavarian State Painting Collections.