Portrait of the Reich President, Friedrich Ebert

When Corinth set up this portrait in 1924, the German republic was barely six years old and already fighting for its life, and the man sitting for him was its first president. Friedrich Ebert had trained as a saddler before the Social Democrats carried him to the head of state in 1919, and he had spent every year since under fire from both the far right and the far left. That winter a court in Magdeburg ruled that his backing of a wartime strike in 1918 had been treason in a narrow legal sense, even while it convicted the journalist who had branded him a traitor. The verdict hurt him. He put off surgery on a failing appendix, and in February 1925 the infection killed him, still in office, at 54. Corinth outlived his sitter by only a few months and died that July, so this likeness of a head of state comes from the final year of both their lives.