Eva

In the summer of 1882 Liebermann was working in Delden, a small town in the eastern Netherlands, where he went almost every year to paint ordinary Dutch life in the open air. This little girl came out of that trip. She stands alone in a park, filling the whole canvas, in a pink dress over dark clothes, wooden clogs on her feet and a bonnet pushed back off her forehead. In one hand she holds an apple, and it is the apple that gave the picture its name, Eva. Liebermann was then in his mid-thirties and known mostly as a painter of peasants and labourers. He signed and dated it the following year, back in his Berlin studio, working up the study he had made outdoors.