In the morning

In the Morning (1900), at the Alte Nationalgalerie, belongs to Corinth's sustained engagement with intimate figure subjects set in domestic or studio spaces. Morning scenes carry implicit connotations of awakening, vulnerability, and private life unguarded by social performance—themes that suited his interest in human physicality and candour. He often used his wife Charlotte or studio models for such subjects, treating the female figure in domestic contexts with the frank attention he also gave to mythological nudes. The painting dates from his first year in Berlin, when his ambitions were at their most expansive and his appetite for unconventional subjects most keenly felt.

Morning light enters from one side to model the figure through strong tonal contrast. Corinth's brushwork is fluid and wet-into-wet in the lighter areas, building a convincing sense of warm early light. The colour temperature shifts across the composition to suggest the specific quality of morning illumination against shadowed interior space.