Portrait of Mayor Klein

Leibl, a pupil of Piloty’s, painted this early portrait of his brother’s father-inlaw shortly after his return from Paris. In its rejection of idealism and with its free brush strokes, it is clearly a reaction to the work of Courbet. As the view er becomes aware of the apparent fragmentation of the background through short, thick, slightly uneven brushstrokes — mostly calm diagonals leading downwards, feeling their way to the figure — the compositional simplicity and rig or of the solid frontal view takes on an aspect of contained vitality that does not define at first, but which comes to life as the picture is viewed. Not understood by Leibl’s contemporaries and caught in critical cross-fire because of its orientation towards French painting at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Leibl’s early work only received recognition in the early twentieth century when it was seen, in the context of Impressionism, as the guiding light for a new epoch.