Two Riders on the Beach

When Max Liebermann painted these two riders trotting along a breezy North Sea beach in 1901, he was Germany's leading Impressionist and one of Berlin's most respected artists. Around 1902 the picture was bought by David Friedmann, a Jewish sugar industrialist in Breslau. Under the Nazis Liebermann was pushed out of the academy he had led, and Friedmann's collection was taken from the family. The painting passed to the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt and vanished. It surfaced only in 2012, among some 1,400 works found in the Munich flat of his son Cornelius. In 2015 it was returned to Friedmann's great-nephew David Toren, who as a boy had last seen it on his relatives' wall before fleeing Germany on a Kindertransport.