Garten des Amsterdamer Waisenhauses

Liebermann kept going back to the same courtyard. From 1876 he drew and painted the garden of Amsterdam's municipal orphanage, watching the children and the old women in their dark dress move through the dappled light under the trees, and this canvas from 1894 is the last and largest of that long series. When he finished it, Strasbourg was a German city, annexed by the German Empire in 1871, and the painting was bought that same year for the city's museum. Only after 1918 did Strasbourg become French again, which is how a German painter's Dutch garden scene ended up in a French collection. Liebermann cared less about the orphanage as a subject than about the light itself, the way sun broke through the leaves and scattered across the paths and the plain clothing.