The Basketweavers (Die Korbflechter)

Max Liebermann's 1872 painting of basketweavers is an early work from the artist who would become Germany's leading Impressionist, but this picture reflects his initial phase of social realism. Liebermann had traveled to Paris and the Netherlands to study, and the influence of Millet and the Barbizon School painters is visible in his early engagement with working-class labor subjects. Basketweavers as a subject combines the tradition of craft labor painting with an interest in the specific gestures and postures of manual work. The Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe holds this early Liebermann as a document of the formative period before he developed the lighter, more atmospheric manner of his mature work.

The early Liebermann employs a dark, tonal palette appropriate to the labor subjects he was painting — the interior light of a workshop, the earth tones of wicker and wooden floors. Figure construction is careful and observational. The handling reflects his Dutch-influenced Realist training rather than the looser Impressionist touch of his later career.