Lot 10 Dα

The public beer garden, the country restaurant frequented by day trippers and the city park offering a place to go for a stroll – the impressionist artists of impressionism discovered the sites of leisure time, where citizens of every walk of life gathered socially to enjoy the pleasures of city life. In the words of the catalogue “Deutscher Impressionismus”: “the impressionists’ garden paintings brought the middle-class leisure society, set within an urban and cultivated nature, into the picture” and with their paintings’ radiant colours and their depiction of light, they may have come closest to the French impressionists in this regard (exh. cat. Bielefeld 2009, p. 95).
And Max Liebermann was no exception here. He had already been devoting attention to the subject of the garden restaurant since his 1902 stay in Hamburg. Around 1916 he was primarily painting the beer garden of the Nikolskoe restaurant, located on the Havel river: in 1819 the Prussian king had given the nearby estate to his daughter Charlotte and her husband Nicholas, the heir to the Russian throne. Our painting is one of the two known studies for the Nationalgalerie Berlin’s large-format picture “Gartenlokal an der Havel: Nikolskoe”, which was also created in 1916. Liebermann had already defined the composition in his prior study: elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen from Berlin’s fashionable society sit at tables covered with white tablecoths and watch the lively activity on the Havel. A fence and three birch trees separate the restaurant from the green shimmer of the water. With sometimes thickly and sometimes thinly applied paint, Liebermann has sketched – in the midst of World War I – a peaceful and cheerful atmosphere, moving particularly close to the French impressionists in the process.