Head of a Boy

In 1896 Wilhelm Leibl was living at Kutterling, a hamlet about three hours' walk from Bad Aibling, in an old farmhouse with low ceilings and small windows. He and his friend Johann Sperl had cut a studio window into its north wall, and that sparse light was what he wanted. When the Lenbachhaus put this panel into an exhibition about the painterly, it stood for Leibl's conviction that how a thing is painted counts for more than what it shows. He said much the same to his friend Julius Mayr, a doctor who later wrote his biography, that if you paint a person as he is, the soul comes along anyway. The panel is only 28 centimetres high, a boy's head under a hat and almost nothing else. Leibl signed and dated it at the upper right, W. Leibl 96.