Selbstbildnis

Liebermann painted this in his early sixties, about as established as a German painter could then be. He had led the Berlin Secession for nearly ten years, and the fact that Wilhelm II had no time for the art he stood for only sharpened the position. Twenty-five years later that standing was gone. He resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933 and died in Berlin in 1935 with almost no public notice taken. The picture spent those years with Josef Haubrich, a Cologne lawyer who went on buying the art the regime had banned and kept it out of sight. In 1946, in a city bombed flat, he handed 362 works to Cologne, and this self-portrait came to the Wallraf-Richartz with them.