Lovis Corinth

In December 1911 Lovis Corinth had a stroke that left his left side paralysed. He was 53, prosperous, and had just been made president of the Berlin Secession, the group of independent German artists. Many thought his career was over.

Instead his painting changed. Before the stroke he was a robust, worldly realist of German Impressionism, painting nudes, feasts and slaughtered oxen with a loaded brush. Afterward, working again with real effort, his hand grew looser and rougher, the paint more agitated, the mood darker, and this late work is what pulls him toward Expressionism. He had once been hostile to the younger Expressionists, and now his own pictures met them halfway.

From 1919 he spent his summers at the Walchensee, a mountain lake in Bavaria, and painted it over and over, around 60 canvases in which the water and peaks dissolve into loose, glowing strokes. Many count these among his finest works. He died at Zandvoort on the Dutch coast in 1925, on a trip to see the old Dutch masters he loved.