Johann Sperl

From 1888 two friends made nine pictures together, one painting the people and the other everything around them. The figures were Wilhelm Leibl's, the landscape was Johann Sperl's, in works such as In the Cabbage Garden of 1888 and The Partridge Hunt of 1890.

Sperl had trained first as a lithographer before entering the Munich academy, and in the class of Arthur von Ramberg he met Leibl. His early success came with country scenes in the taste of the day, among them a Swabian wedding procession in 1873. Then, following Leibl out of the city, he began to paint in the open air and turned to landscape for good. For more than two decades the two shared lodgings and studios in villages near Rosenheim, Sperl's gardens, meadows and orchards growing up beside Leibl's quiet interiors.

From 1895 the Berlin collector and dealer Ernst Seeger handled their sales and gave both of them security. After Leibl's death in 1900 Sperl's seasonal landscapes, above all his winter scenes, sold well, until a stroke in the spring of 1910 ended his painting. When he died in 1914, he was buried in Leibl's grave in Würzburg.