Der Hamburgische Professorenkonvent

Hamburg in 1905 was a rich trading city with no university. What it had instead was the Professorenkonvent, a board formed in 1901 out of the directors of its scientific institutions, nine men who between them ran the city's learning. Alfred Lichtwark, who directed the Kunsthalle and sat on that board, wrote to Max Liebermann in January 1905 offering him the group as a commission and describing the heads one by one. Liebermann agreed the next day. Lichtwark wanted for Hamburg what Amsterdam had in its old regents' portraits, a picture of the men who ran things, and he put himself into it along with Justus Brinckmann, who ran the applied-arts museum. The money was found by Alfred Beit. Hamburg opened its university in 1919, 13 years after the canvas arrived.