The Flax Barn at Laren

By the 1880s most German painters chasing prestige were still turning out gods and battle scenes. Liebermann spent his summers instead in Laren, a farming village in the Dutch countryside, watching people work. This barn is where flax was spun into yarn, and the whole process fascinated him. He painted it much as he found it: rows of women at their spinning wheels, with children set along the window wall to keep the wheels turning. When it hung at the Paris Salon in 1887 the response was cool, partly because he had shown child labour so plainly, at a time when everyday genre painting preferred to look away. The older master Adolph von Menzel gave it the compliment Liebermann remembered best, that it was the one picture in the room showing real people rather than posed models.