Play in the meadow

Play in the Meadow, painted in 1882, is an early Max Klinger work showing the Leipzig-born artist before his mature Symbolist phase had fully developed. Klinger at this early stage was working within the academic realist tradition of German figure painting, influenced by painters such as Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach whose work he had encountered during his training in Berlin and Karlsruhe. The meadow play subject — children or figures at leisure in an open landscape — was well established in European genre painting and gave the young Klinger an opportunity to demonstrate his ability with both figure and landscape simultaneously. The subsequent history of the work — it entered the Führermuseum collection under the Nazi regime's systematic accumulation of German art — gives it a disturbing institutional provenance, though the painting itself is a straightforward early genre work. The museum was never completed or opened before the end of the Second World War.

As an 1882 work, this painting shows Klinger still working within academic realist conventions: figures modelled with careful tonal gradients, landscape handled in the tradition of German Naturalism with attention to atmospheric recession. The paint handling is more conservative than his later, more Symbolist-influenced works, with smooth blending in the figure areas and a more systematically worked landscape.