The Artist’s Daughter Käthe
  • Max Liebermann
  • Berlin 1847 - 1935
  • The Artist’s Daughter Käthe, circa 1900
  • Charcoal, partly smeared, on beige paper,
  • signed on the right: MLiebermann (interlaced)
  • 349 × 290 mm
Literature:
Graphisches Kabinett, Galerie Ernst Arnhold,
cat: Handzeichnungen Deutscher Meister,
Dresden/Breslau 1921, no. 331, ill. p. 63

Max Liebermann’s daughter Käthe served as the model for this drawing, probably on the large sofa in the studio on the upper storey of his house on Pariser Platz. The artist’s only child was born in 1885 and died in 1952 in the USA, where she had immigrated in 1939 with her husband Dr. Kurt Riezler and their daughter Maria.

However, the real protagonist of the sketch is the infamous dachshund Männe, both the darling and the tyrant of the family. Liebermann had received him as a gift from his friend Hugo von Tschudi, director of the national gallery in Berlin, likely for his fiftieth birthday in 1897. Männe reappears in almost every image of the family’s life from these years.

We are grateful to Margreet Nouwen for her assistance with this catalogue entry.