In the summer of 1913, Liebermann stayed, at the recommendation of Paul Cassirer, in the luxury hotel Huis ter Duin in the coastal resort town of Noordwijk. On a walk in the dunes there, he encountered an “English trainer with a pack of spaniels,” as he wrote from Berlin to Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg1. The dogs reminded him very much of Velasquez, as well as of his own unsatisfactory attempts to capture these animals in art while a student in Weimar.
Liebermann made a dozen sketches of this subject while in Noordwijk, which he would later use in mirror reversal as the prototype for the painting Hunter in the Dunes(Fig. 1), of which would make several versions in that same year2. Our drawing is one of the first studies that Liebermann put on paper in the dunes.
We are grateful to Margreet Nouwen for her assistance with this catalogue entry.
- Birgit Pflugmacher: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Alfred Lichtwark und
Max Liebermann, Hildesheim – Zurich – New York 2003, p. 469 - Matthias Eberle: Max Liebermann, Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde und
Oelstudien, Munich 1996, vol. I I., nos. 1913/34-37, ills. pp. 879-883