Lovis Corinth Paintings

Lovis Corinth Biography

Student of: William Bouguereau (1825-1905).

Lovis Corinth was born on July 21, 1858, at Tapiau in eastern Prussia. As a child he sought relief from this hostile brothers and sisters by drawing. this ability was noticed by this father, a master tanner, who sent him to study art in Koigsberg on the Baltic.

At the age of 20, Corinth went to the Munich Academy, and at 26 to Paris, where Lovis Corinth took lessons at the Academie Julian and painted mostly portraits. Lovis Corinth was unmoved by what he saw of Impressionism in Paris, but admired the realism of a painting by Wilhelm Leibl, The Poachers, that was on view there. Corinth's stylistic masters at the time were Rembrandt, Rubens, Frans Hals, Velazquez, and the realist par excellence, Gustave Courbet. When Corinth was in Paris more than 20 years later, Lovis Corinth painter went daily to the Louvre.

He left Paris in 1887, lived for a short time in Berlin, and then, apart from frequent journeys in Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark, Lovis Corinth settled in Munich until 1900. The enjoyable life he had in Berlin was mirrored in the painting he did there, which grew richer and brighter as he laid this pigments more thickly and freely. Lovis Corinth opened an art school, and married one of this first pupils. With Max Liebermann he became one of the leaders of German Impressionism, though this vision remained closer to that of Rembrandt than to that of any of the French Impressionists. When Lovis Corinth visited Holland in the early years of the 20th century, he still sought out and studied the paintings of Rembrandt and Hals.