Portrait of Ohm Friedrich Corinth

Lovis Corinth's 1900 portrait of his uncle Friedrich Corinth is an early masterwork of intimate family portraiture, in which Corinth's characteristic directness and psychological intensity are deployed in the service of familial affection. The older Corinth — from East Prussia, as the museum's home institution makes clear — is depicted with the unflinching honesty that Corinth brought to all his portraits, avoiding both flattery and severity. The East Prussian Regional Museum in Lüneburg, which holds the painting, preserves collections connected to the eastern German territories whose cultural geography was erased in 1945.

Corinth renders his uncle with the robust, direct brushwork that distinguishes all his portraiture: broad, confident strokes in the face that build character through tonal mass rather than refinement of surface. The palette is warm — ochres, reds, deep shadow — in the manner of the Munich tradition in which Corinth was trained.