Portrait of the painter Walter Leistikow

Walter Leistikow was a German landscape painter and one of the founders of the Berlin Secession, the association of progressive German artists that Lovis Corinth helped lead into the early twentieth century. Corinth's 1900 portrait of his fellow Secession founder and close friend captures Leistikow with the psychological directness that marks all his finest portraits. The two men were allies in the struggle to introduce modern French-influenced painting into German artistic life against the resistance of the Wilhelmine academic establishment. Leistikow died in 1908, relatively young; this portrait preserves him at the height of his activity as an artist and arts organizer.

Corinth renders Leistikow with the robust, direct brushwork that characterizes his portraiture: broad, confident strokes in the face that build character through tonal mass. The palette is warm and dark — deep earth tones, ochres — with the face emerging strongly from a shadowed ground. The handling is assured and affectionate.