Max Liebermann

The present work depicts Liebermann's garden at his house on the Wannsee near Berlin. Having attained considerable recognition as an artist, followed by financial success, the artist commissioned a villa in 1909, sparing no expense on its formal flower beds, exotic shrubs and thick hedges. The Wannsee villa became Liebermann's summer residence during the last decades of his life, and the paintings from this period show his garden in all its glory. Within this series, the artist rendered his subject from various angles, sometimes focusing on the enclosed, cultivated patches of flowers while at other times representing the open expanses. In the present version, the house is visible on the left of the composition, a path in the foreground leading the viewer's eye past the bushes and flowers painted in free-flowing, impressionistic brush-strokes. His practice of painting en plein air, as well as his method of exploring the same subject from a variety of viewpoints, demonstrates Liebermann's Impressionist tendencies. Like Claude Monet, who never tired of painting his flower garden at Giverny, Liebermann found a constant source of inspiration in the Wannsee garden, and in his later work depicted this subject with a bolder use of colours and a freer execution than in his earlier work.

Fig. 1, A view of Liebermann's garden, circa 1925