Two riders on the beach

In 1903 Scheveningen, the beach resort next to The Hague, had a huge Kurhaus and a fashionable bathing crowd, and riding out along the sand was part of what people came for. Liebermann spent his summers there from 1900, filling sketchbooks with bathers, tennis players and riders, and the finished canvases were painted afterwards in his Berlin studio.

He had been going to Holland for more than 30 years by then, mostly for people at work: women mending nets, old men in an Amsterdam almshouse, linen spread out on the grass to bleach. This is the holiday version of the same country. Dutch records name the horsewoman here as Catharina van der Kuijlen, riding with her escort.

The painting reached the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne in 1950, a gift from the Felten and Guilleaume cable works in the city.