Works by Max Liebermann

Max Liebermann painted orphan girls in Amsterdam, a weaver at his loom and the crowd in a Munich beer garden, and gave his name to the patches of sunlight that fall through leaves in his pictures.

Woman with a Cat, from 1878, sets an old woman in a striped skirt on a wooden chair against a bare brick wall, a black cat in her lap. Critics of his day, who disliked his often sombre pictures of working people, called him an "apostle of ugliness". Holland taught him more than Paris did: in Haarlem in 1875 he copied Frans Hals and his manner grew brighter and more spontaneous, and he went back to the Netherlands year after year. He made his first studies of the Amsterdam orphanage in 1876; Amsterdam orphan girls in a garden, sewing in white caps and aprons, dates from 1885.

The sunspots began around 1880, when he looked into the garden of a Catholic home for old men and saw men in black on benches in the sun. In Munich beer garden, from 1884, the patches lie on the gravel, the white chairs and the children's clothes. In 1910 he moved into a country house on the Wannsee outside Berlin, laid out its large garden with Alfred Lichtwark, and from the 1910s that garden was what he painted most. In Terrace in the Garden near the Wannsee towards Northwest, of 1916, beds of yellow and blue flowers lie in a bright green lawn, laid on in thick strokes. Self-portraits were a habit from 1902: in Self-Portrait with sports cap at the easel, of 1925, he holds palette and brush against a dark ground.

Sources: Wikipedia, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Alte Nationalgalerie, J. Paul Getty Museum, Städel Museum, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Hamburger Kunsthalle.