Portrait of the publisher Bruno Cassirer 1921

This portrait of Bruno Cassirer, the publisher, was made by Max Liebermann using oil paints. I love to think about how the painting was made. It looks like Liebermann worked alla prima, wet-on-wet, building up the image of Cassirer directly on the canvas. I can feel him, trying to get the light just right on the face. It is like he’s searching for something, not just a likeness, but maybe a truth about the man. Look at how he used brown in the background. That color creates a really somber mood, and this feeling kind of bleeds into the whole portrait. Maybe Liebermann saw something serious or melancholic in Cassirer. Or maybe he was just in a mood that day! Liebermann was part of the German Impressionist movement, so he was definitely looking at what the French painters were up to. The way he handles the paint and the light feels connected to their experiments, but he’s also doing his own thing. That’s the beauty of painting; it’s an ongoing conversation across time, where everyone’s riffing on what came before.