Max Liebermann

On the evening of 30 January 1933, columns of Nazi supporters marched with torches through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Max Liebermann watched from the windows of his house, which stood right beside the gate on Pariser Platz. He was 85, Jewish, and for years the most honoured painter in Germany, and his reaction became a Berlin legend of disgust. He said he could not possibly eat as much as he would like to throw up.

By then Liebermann had led German painting for a generation. He brought a French-flavoured Impressionism to Berlin and painted beer gardens, Dutch orphanages and workers at their trades, and from 1920 he presided over the Prussian Academy of Arts, the country's senior art institution. In the spring of 1933 the Academy resolved to stop showing work by Jewish artists, and he resigned before he could be pushed out.

His paintings were pulled from German museums. He spent his last years withdrawn, often at his summer villa on the Wannsee lake outside Berlin, painting the flower beds of its garden over and over, a subject that asked nothing of the world beyond the fence. He died in Berlin in February 1935, and so few people dared to come to the funeral that it was attended by little more than his family.