Lot 200 N α

Towards the end of the 19th century Max Liebermann, the cosmopolitan Berliner famous for his Impressionistic depictions of his garden in Wannsee, found his favourite subjects during his long summer holidays in the Netherlands. There the well-to-do urbanite was interested in motifs taken from the working life of villagers labouring on rural farms and in the textile mills. In addition to precisely observing technical working procedures, he also focused his attention on children and adolescents. There, in works like “Zwei Mädchen aus Laren”, in which the two girls are depicted in a close-up that nearly fills the canvas, he found the psychologically interesting aspect. Torn back and forth between curiosity and their sense of duty, for a fleeting moment the two young ladies dressed smartly in light-coloured pinafore dresses remain turned towards the gaze of the painter - or, alternatively, the viewer - only to then hurry along again, presumably on their way to school. The fact that their facial features are not described in greater detail is to be understood in this context, just as the deliberate indistinctness can surely also be interpreted as Liebermann's intention. The adorable quality of children has purposely been avoided. The fact that they have black shoes instead of the light-coloured wooden clogs that were more common underscores this aspect and indicates that the girls come from a wealthier home.
The study offered here belongs to a relatively small number of oil sketches - now mostly owned by museums or assumed to be lost - related to the two versions of “Schulgang in Laren” painted in 1898 (Eberle 1898/3, 1898/4).