Villa à Hilversum

Around 1900 Liebermann's painting was changing. The dark, earnest scenes of workers that had made his name gave way to lighter, sunnier subjects touched by French Impressionism, which he found on his yearly summer visits to Holland. He painted this in 1901 in Hilversum, near the old Zuiderzee, the brushwork loose and quick under a broad sky. He was then in his mid-fifties and about to help found the Berlin Secession. The house set back among the trees was no anonymous villa. It belonged to Abraham Bredius, the Dutch art historian who was, in those very years, the reigning authority on Rembrandt.