The Veterinarian Reindl in the Arbour

In the middle of the 1880s Wilhelm Leibl went through a deep crisis. The Poachers, a large group picture he worked on in Aibling from 1881 to 1886, met indifference in Paris, Cologne and Berlin, and he cut the canvas apart. The turn came in 1889, with 26 paintings shown at the Gurlitt gallery in Berlin and a gold medal at the Paris World's Fair, the only one awarded there to a German artist. The museum dates this small panel to around 1890, in the first years after that recovery. It is barely 26 centimetres high, painted on mahogany, and shows a veterinarian named Reindl in a garden arbour, in his hat, reading a newspaper. As a mature painter Leibl set almost all his figures indoors, and he only rarely took a sitter out into the open air like this.