Breakfast in Max Halbe's Garden

Corinth wrote the dates straight onto the canvas at the lower right, 28 to 31 August 1899, in Bernried, the village on Lake Starnberg where this garden was. Four days for a group of friends at breakfast out of doors. Their host was the playwright Max Halbe, whose drama Jugend, Youth, had made his name six years earlier, and both men were living in Munich at the time. It was one of Corinth's last summers as a Munich painter. In 1900 the Munich Secession, the city's association of independent artists, turned down his Salome, the Berlin Secession showed it to great success, and in 1901 he moved to Berlin for good. The Lenbachhaus bought this breakfast in 1927.