19th Century German Realism

About

When Gustave Courbet showed his work at Munich's international art exhibition in 1869, a group of young painters around Wilhelm Leibl took notice. The Leibl circle set aside literary subjects and idealised finish in favour of painting what stood in front of them, often country people in plain interiors. Leibl's Three Women in Church (1878–82), worked on for years in a village church, renders faces, hands and prayer books with an exactness that recalls Holbein.

German Realism never became a single school. In Berlin, Adolph Menzel had been painting informal rooms and views since the 1840s, as in The Balcony Room (1845), and later turned the same unsparing eye on factories and court receptions. Max Liebermann painted Dutch orphanages, flax barns and field workers in the 1870s and 1880s, loosening his touch as he went. Lovis Corinth, trained in this climate, carried its physical directness into the 20th century.