Femmes plumant des oies

Liebermann was 25 and almost unknown when he showed this in the early 1870s, and the reaction was scorn. Critics thought a dim shed full of working women plucking geese was too low and ugly to be a serious subject, and they disliked the heavy brown gloom he painted it in. That gloom was deliberate. He had been looking hard at 17th century Dutch painting, at the dark interiors of Rembrandt and Frans Hals, and at a Hungarian painter's large canvas of flax workers he had seen shortly before. The picture found one important admirer. A railway millionaire, Bethel Strousberg, bought it, and it launched the career of the man who decades later would preside over the Berlin Secession.