Flowers and Daughter Wilhelmine

By 1920 Corinth had thrown himself into flower painting, and here he wove it together with a portrait of his daughter. Wilhelmine was 11, born in 1909 to the painter and his wife Charlotte Berend, who had come to him as a student before they married. She sits nearly swallowed by a loose bank of spring flowers, amaryllis, arums and lilac, her small face tucked among the blooms in a way that reads as shyness. Corinth painted his family all his life and watched his children grow from one canvas to the next. Wilhelmine kept the memory the other way round: half a century after his death, from New York, where she had emigrated, she could still recall the smallest details of her childhood with him.