The painter Johann Sperl

Leibl's 1872 portrait of Johann Sperl — painted on mahogany wood and now in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne — depicts his closest long-term friend and companion. Johann Sperl (1840-1914) was a landscape painter and close associate who would eventually share a house with Leibl in rural Bavaria for many years. The friendship between Leibl and Sperl was one of the most sustained relationships in Leibl's life, and the portrait documents the warmth and directness of that relationship. The mahogany support in 1872 places Leibl's choice of this technically demanding material earlier than his major mahogany panel works of the late 1870s — he was already experimenting with the harder, more precise surface. The Wallraf-Richartz, as one of Germany's major museums of European painting from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, acquired this as a significant example of German realist portraiture.

Painting on mahogany required Leibl to work more slowly and deliberately than on canvas, as the dense, non-absorbent surface does not forgive corrections easily. The portrait of Sperl on this material suggests Leibl wanted to achieve a particular precision and permanence for the image of his friend.