Q50332186

Lovis Corinth produced this canvas in 1908, three years before the stroke that would permanently affect his right hand and paradoxically liberate his late style into something even more expressive and agitated. By 1908 Corinth was at the height of his powers in Berlin, having established himself as a leading figure of German modernism alongside Max Slevogt and Max Liebermann. That year he was deeply engaged with figure painting, still life, and occasional landscape, working with a muscular directness that bridged the German Naturalist tradition with the gestural intensity of the emerging Expressionist movement. The Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden holds several Corinth works, reflecting the Saxony collections' historically strong commitment to German modernist painting from the turn of the century.

Corinth's 1908 canvases display his characteristic thick, fluid application of oil paint with wide, assertive brushstrokes that follow the mass and direction of forms. He builds flesh tones through layered color — reds, ochres, and whites — rather than blended transitions, giving surfaces a vivid, almost physical presence. Drawing is subsumed into paint rather than laid under it.