Walchensee, Serpentine

"Walchensee, Serpentine" from 1920 is part of Corinth's celebrated series of paintings made at the Walchensee, a glacial lake in the Bavarian Alps that became his most sustained and celebrated late-career subject. After acquiring a cottage there in 1919, Corinth painted the lake across dozens of canvases until his death in 1925, recording its moods through all seasons. The Walchensee series is regarded as the culmination of his late style — wild, swirling landscapes in which the mountains and water are rendered with the same subjective intensity that had characterized his earlier figure paintings. This "Serpentine" view likely traces one of the curving roads or shoreline paths that wind through the alpine terrain above the lake.

The Walchensee paintings show Corinth at maximum expressive freedom — paint applied in broad, swirling strokes that map the topography of mountain, forest, and water into a rhythmic surface energy. Color is pushed beyond description into feeling: greens become acid, blues deepen to near-black, and light passages blaze with raw white or yellow. The serpentine motif — a winding path or shoreline — would give compositional direction to the swirling marks.