Station: [11] Max Liebermann: „Girl and Goat“ (1887)

A young girl is sitting in a field, her legs stretched out. She wears the everyday garb of the Dutch peasant population: a black dress, white bonnet and heavy clogs. Doesn’t it look as if the child were rooted in the land? Her posture and chunky clogs exude weightiness; nothing seems more unlikely than that the girl could jump up the next moment and run away. Contrasting with this is her bright bonnet whose hues reappear in the grazing goat and the narrow band of sky. Due to this deliberate colouring, we follow the gaze of the young shepherdess and look, like her, into the distance where the horizon stretches endlessly.

Max Liebermann’s painting “Girl and Goat” is from a period in his career when the artist sought to capture the living conditions and work environment of the Dutch rural population in realistic images without glossing over the hardships. But when we look at this atmospheric glimpse of rural life, we get the sense that Liebermann was already pursuing a different concern here. The horizon is placed unusually high in this painting; as a result, the field takes up almost the entire canvas. The thick paint application and at times almost abstract brushwork cause the grassland to vibrate in shades of green, brown and yellow. Liebermann’s extraordinary talent for capturing atmospheric moments is thus already evident in “Girl and Goat”. The next decade would see the artist evolve into the leading German protagonist of Impressionism.