The Pianist Conrad Ansorge

Conrad Ansorge had studied with Franz Liszt in Weimar in 1885 and 1886, in the last years of the old virtuoso's life, and by 1903 he was a well-known pianist and teacher in Berlin, where Corinth now lived too. Corinth painted him with no piano in sight. The Lenbachhaus describes the setting as an unassuming corner of Ansorge's own garden, the musician sitting sideways on a chair as a prosperous private man. Sunlight falls through the leaves in patches, and the suit is a long passage of white on white against a pale, lined face. The canvas is large, more than 1.4 metres high, and at the lower left Corinth wrote the sitter's name, his own, pinx, Latin for painted it, and the year. It belongs to the Munich Secession, the artists' association Corinth had helped found in 1892, which has lent it to the Lenbachhaus since 1976.