Lot 397 Dα

This previously little-known, knee-length portrait of a woman depicts the model with a neutral expression, almost laconically, gazing past the viewer. Here, as usual, Liebermann seeks to avoid any sort of psychologising presentation of the sitter, capturing the status quo. At the same time, Ella Weidmann, who was born in Hamburg in 1894, would one day be able to look back on a chequered life in which she was married four times, worked as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War as well as in the spas of Hamburg-Eppendorf, converted from the Jewish to the Catholic faith and would take her own life while working for the Iranian oil company in Abadan. The portrait was commissioned by her second husband, Hans Röhl, who was a friend of Max Liebermann.