Portrait of August Batschari

In 1918, the last year of the First World War, Max Liebermann painted August Batschari, a cigarette manufacturer from Baden-Baden. Batschari had started out as a salesman for a tobacco merchant, married the owner's daughter, and built the business into a factory that by 1907 could turn out one and a half million cigarettes a day. He understood images. His brands, with names like Mercedes and Sleipner, were sold on posters by leading German commercial artists such as Ludwig Hohlwein and Lucian Bernhard. For his own likeness he went to Liebermann, then past 70 and much in demand as a portrait painter. Batschari was about 64 here and died five years later. The canvas passed to Robert Batschari in Baden-Baden, then vanished from view until it came up at auction in Berlin and Cologne in 1961, the year the museum in Münster bought it.