Young woman with cats

Young woman with cats
Lovis Corinth , 1904
Oil on canvas
78.5 × 60 cm
State Gallery Stuttgart, Stuttgart

Young woman with cats is a painting by the painter Lovis Corinth from 1904 . It is now in the State Gallery in Stuttgart . The person portrayed is Lovis Corinth's wife, Charlotte Berend , who was 24 years old at the time. Lovis Corinth's signature can be found in the upper right corner of the picture.

Image content

Charlotte Berend has been portrayed several times by Lovis Corinth. Here he depicts his wife, 23 years his junior, in a flowered dress and a hat decorated with flowers. The subject of the picture, the direction of the gaze and the way in which color is used is reminiscent of early French Impressionism . Although Lovis Corinth is occasionally counted among the Impressionists, the portrait is more direct and more clearly articulated than similar paintings by French Impressionists. The painting exudes intimacy with the sitter. The youth and innocence of the sitter is underlined by the two young cats that Charlotte Berend is holding in her hands.

background

Charlotte Berend was born on May 25, 1880 in Berlin as the second daughter of the Jewish cotton importer Ernst Berend and his wife Hedwig, née Gumpertz. Although initially against it, her father consented to his daughter studying art because of her talent for drawing. In 1898 she passed the examination for admission to the State Art School in Klosterstrasse and studied with Maximilian Schäfer . A year later she attended school at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin and continued her studies with Eva Stort and Ludwig Manzel .

From 1901 Charlotte Berend was the first student to take lessons from Lovis Corinth, who had founded a private "painting school for women" and to whom she was regularly available as a model from 1902 . In the following year, on March 26, 1903, Lovis Corinth and Charlotte Berend married, choosing the double name Berend-Corinth. In 1904 (date of baptism: April 4, 1905) their son Thomas Corinth was born. The daughter Wilhelmine Corinth followed six years later on June 13, 1909.

Charlotte Berend-Corinth painted in a similar way to her husband and is assigned to the Berlin Secession . Her older sister is the writer Alice Berend . Charlotte Berend-Corinth is best known today as the editor of his catalog raisonné.

supporting documents

literature

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany , Harry N. Abrams, New York 1981, ISBN 0-87099-263-5

Single receipts

1. ^ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 72