Walter Leistikow

Walter Leistikow was thrown out of the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin after about six months, told he lacked talent. He kept painting anyway, and made the quiet lakes and pine woods of the Grunewald, on the western edge of Berlin, his lifelong subject, usually at dusk and in a dark, still palette.

In 1898 one of those lake pictures was rejected by the city's big official exhibition. This time the snub landed differently. Leistikow stood at the centre of a group of Berlin artists already chafing at the conservative jury, and the rejection helped push them to break away and found the Berlin Secession, with the painter Max Liebermann as its president. Their aim was to bring French Impressionism, and what came after it, into a resistant German art world.

Leistikow ran the new group's affairs and designed its posters, and among his friends was the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose brooding vision of nature left its mark on him. Worn down by long illness, he died in 1908 at only 42. The dark, silent lakes of the Grunewald that he painted over and over still lie on Berlin's western edge, now ringed by the wealthy villa district that grew up around them.