Lot 216 Dα

Twisting alleys with the attendant lively alternation of light and shadow were something Max Liebermann loved as a theme, as is shown by the numerous studies he made of paths and streets in Holland or - such as here, albeit far more rarely - in Venice. Not dissimilar to the busy Jewish quarter in Amsterdam, the Venetian houses, all built so closely together, must have exerted a special attraction on Liebermann.
In two further Venetian street scenes with a comparable theme (Eberle 1878/17 and 1878/20) in compositional terms Liebermann relies on figures populating the narrow alleyways. Into a watercolour that is part of the Hamburger Kunsthalle collection (the theme is very closely related to the street scene here), the painter integrated the image of an old woman, whom he portrayed in a further oil study (Eberle 1878/19). Against this background it seems all the more remarkable that in the present work Liebermann eschews adding any figures in favour of a portrait only of the architecture, executed here with a masterfully staged rhythm of bright and dark façade elements that thereby achieves almost abstract qualities.