Wilhelm Leibl | Genre painter

Wilhelm Maria Hubertus Leibl (1844-1900) was a German realist painter of portraits and scenes of peasant life.

Leibl was born in Cologne, where his father was the director of the Cathedral choir.

He was apprenticed to a locksmith before beginning his artistic training with the local painter Hermann Becker in 1861.

He entered the Munich Academy in 1864, subsequently studying with several artists including Carl Theodor von Piloty.

He set up a group studio in 1869, with Johann Sperl, Theodor Alt and Rudolf Hirth du Frênes.

At about the same time, Gustave Courbet visited Munich to exhibit his work, making a considerable impression on many of the local artists by his demonstrations of alla prima painting directly from nature.

Leibl's paintings, which already reflected his admiration for the Dutch old masters, became looser in style, their subjects rendered with thickly brushed paint against dark backgrounds.

Career

In 1869, following Courbet's suggestion, Leibl went to Paris, where he was introduced to Édouard Manet, but was forced to return to Germany in 1870, due to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.

In 1873 Leibl left Munich for the isolated Bavarian countryside, where he depicted the local peasants in everyday scenes devoid of sentimentality or anecdote.

The sketchlike quality of his earlier paintings was replaced by greater precision and attention to drawing.

Living from 1878 to 1882 in Berbling, he painted perhaps his best-known work, the Three Women in Church (Kunsthalle, Hamburg).

Its intensely realistic style recalls Hans Holbein in its clarity of definition.

During the following years he moved to the town of Bad Aibling and, in 1892, to Kutterling, as his paintings united the disciplined drawing he had adopted in the 1880s with a new delicacy and luminosity.

Leibl painted without preliminary drawing, setting to work directly with color, an approach that has parallels to Impressionism.

His commitment to the representation of reality as the eye sees it earned him recognition in his lifetime as the preeminent artist of a group known as the Leibl-Kreis (Leibl Circle) that included, among others, Carl Schuch, Wilhelm Trübner, Otto Scholderer and Hans Thoma.

During the first half of the 1870s, Leibl executed a series of 19 etchings in a meticulous style.

His charcoal drawings are conceived in great masses of light and shadow, blocked in as though he were using a brush and paint.

He visited the Netherlands in 1898, and his work was included in the Berlin Secession exhibition the following year. He died in Würzburg in 1900.

Nazi-looted art

In 2009 the German Advisory Commission for the Return of Cultural Property Seized as a Result of Nazi Persecution recommended that Leibl's painting “Bauernmädchen ohne Hut mit weißem Halstuch” (‘Peasant Girl without a Hat and with a White Headcloth’) (1897), which had been seized by the Nazis, be restituted to the heirs of Dr. Alexander Lewin. | Source: © Wikipedia

Wilhelm Maria Hubertus Leibl (1844-1900) è stato un pittore Tedesco.

Era il quinto dei sei figli del direttore musicale del Duomo di Colonia Carl Leibl e di Maria Gertrud Lemper.

Dopo aver studiato all'Accademia di Monaco di Baviera, nel 1869 incontrò Gustave Courbet, allora in Germania per tenere diverse mostre.

Il realismo di Courbet nel dipingere direttamente la natura entusiasmò Leibl, inducendolo ad osservare i soggetti delle sue opere in modo sempre più oggettivo.

Le opere di Leibl, che già riflettevano la sua ammirazione per gli antichi maestri Olandesi (in particolare per Rembrandt), divennero allora più sciolti nello stile e con colori fittamente spazzolati su sfondi scuri.

Nei mesi seguenti Leibl visse per alcuni mesi a Parigi, lavorando con Courbet e rinforzando il suo attaccamento al realismo.

Durante questo soggiorno ebbe l'opportunità di incontrare alcuni tra i più importanti impressionisti, tra cui Édouard Manet.

Questi incontri spinsero Leibl a dipingere senza disegni preliminari, lavorando direttamente ed istintivamente col colore, riproducendo quello che vide con un tocco vigoroso e sicuro; un metodo che ha paralleli con l'impressionismo.

Tuttavia, a causa dello scoppio della guerra franco-prussiana, fu costretto a tornare in Germania, dove visse a Monaco di Baviera fino al 1873, per poi trasferirsi in alcuni piccoli villaggi dell'isolata campagna bavarese.

In questi anni dipinse ritratti di contadini e scene di vita paesana di tutti i giorni.

Il suo stile si basa su una registrazione diretta e attenta della natura e delle figure, descritte senza il sentimentalismo tipico dell'arte tedesca del periodo, sempre rifiutato da Leibl che si indirizzò verso un intenso realismo.

Col passare degli anni la dura luminosità lascia il posto a profili più morbidi: al disegno disciplinato e alla superba tecnica forte e marcata si affianca una nuova precisione e meticolosità per i dettagli, osservati sempre con grande attenzione.

Leibl continuò a dipingere fino alla morte, avvenuta a Würzburg il 4 dicembre 1900.

Negli anni seguenti le sue opere influenzarono il movimento della Nuova oggettività, in particolare per il modo di rendere su tela le figure ed i ritratti.