Lot 15
  • 15

Wilhelm Leibl

Estimate
60,000 - 80,000 GBP
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Description

  • Wilhelm Leibl
  • Bauernmädchen (Farm Girl)
  • oil on canvas
  • 42.5 by 34cm., 16 3/4 by 9 1/2 in.

Provenance

By descent from the artist to the present owner

Exhibited

Rosenheim, Städtische Galerie, Wilhelm Leibl und sein Malerkreis, 1985, no. 82a

Condition

Original canvas. There is only one small spot of fluorescing varnish to the upper left of the work visible under ultraviolet light, and no signs of retouching. The work is overall in very good condition and ready to hang. Held in a simple, faux-mahogany frame with a gold inner edge.
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Catalogue Note

'Ich male den Menschen wie er ist, da ist die Seele ohnehin dabei' ('I paint people the way they are, their soul is already there anyway')
Wilhelm Leibl

Executed circa 1895 and always in the possession of the artist's family, the present work epitomises the spontaneous, pared down but nonetheless intensely expressive sketches in oil and pencil Leibl made in the 1890s of members of the local farming community in the countryside around Munich. Through the simplest juxtaposition of lines and surfaces, shadow and light, Leibl succeeded in conveying the richest human presence. 

Although the identity of the sitter is unknown, Emil Waldmann surmises that she might have been Leibl's cook and housekeeper Marie Ebersberger who sat for him for his painting Girl by a Stove of 1895 (fig. 1). 

In 1873, after studying at the Munich Academy and a spell in Paris, Leibl moved to Upper Bavaria where he was to spend the rest of his life. Even as  a northerner born in Cologne, Leibl felt a tremendous affinity towards the humble people of the Bavarian countryside, drawn by their friendliness and down-to-earthness which appealed to his deeply human temperament. By his own account, he preferred painting peasant girls, because 'ladies always want to be entertained while sitting', while the girls of the villages let him get on with his work and were less vain. 

Leibl's entire oeuvre is about the human face, at times concentrated, devoted, contemplative, but always richly expressive and painted with an unashamed straightforwardness. Whether in his earlier, more painterly works, in which composition is subordinate to a highly finished paint surface, or in his later, more reduced pictures showing the workings underlying his draughtsmanship, a simplicity and almost Düreresque clarity always remains, lifting his subjects out of their modest circumstances to a higher plane.

For a crayon drawing of a near identical composition depicting the same model, see Emil Waldmann, Wilhelm Leibl als Zeichner, Munich, 1942, no. 68, pp. 27 & 92, illustrated.

Fig. 1, Wilhelm Leibl, Mädchen am Herd (Girl by a Stove), Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum