Three Women in Church

Wilhelm Leibl spent about three and a half years on this single picture, from 1878 to the end of 1881, most of it inside a small village church at Berbling in Bavaria. He painted three local peasant women, from grandmother to girl, sitting in a pew, and he worked from them directly, on the spot, at the pace real cloth and skin demanded. The project nearly collapsed when the parish priest who had let him in died and his replacement refused to allow it. Only the intervention of Luitpold, the prince regent of Bavaria, got Leibl back through the door. He wanted no story and no sentiment, only exactly what sat in front of him, the worn prayer book, the black Sunday clothes, the light on three faces at prayer.