慕尼黑啤酒花园

Liebermann came to Munich in 1878. The next year he showed a painting of the boy Jesus among the rabbis in the temple, and the Bavarian parliament ended up debating it, with speakers attacking the picture and the fact that a Jew had painted it. He stayed another five years. This beer garden, close to the one at the Augustiner, is what came at the end of them, men and women from every level of the city sitting together under the trees, a band on a stand at the back, and the sunlight falling through the leaves in rings and blotches. He built it in the studio out of dozens of separate studies rather than painting it on the spot. On one of the empty chairs he put a hat carrying his own monogram. He sent it to the Paris Salon in 1884 and left Munich for Berlin the same year.