Girl from Laren Peeling Potatoes with Sleeping Child in a Basket

Max Liebermann's Girl from Laren Peeling Potatoes with a Sleeping Child in a Basket was painted during his extensive work in the Dutch village of Laren in the late 1880s, part of his deep engagement with Dutch peasant and working-class life. Laren, in the province of North Holland, was a center of Dutch peasant painting that drew numerous artists from both the Netherlands and Germany. Liebermann's Dutch period was crucial to his development as Germany's leading Impressionist, and scenes like this one — a young woman peeling potatoes, an infant asleep nearby — grounded his painterly experimentation in the observation of specific, unheroic working lives.

The interior light — filtered, grey-north Dutch light — is Liebermann's primary concern. The figure is modelled with a directness that eschews prettification: the hands occupied with work, the concentration of domestic labor. His palette in Dutch interiors tends toward warm ochres and cool greys, handled with greater freedom than academic precedent.