#german

He trained as a pharmacist and only turned to painting after an illness, or so the story goes, and then spent decades on small comic scenes of shabby, striving men. He made more than one version of this one. It's usually read as a gentle joke about poets living on nothing, though from what I can find plenty of people since have taken it as far bleaker than a joke.

They say he kept a handwritten catalogue of every single thing he made, numbering each one as it left the easel — the pencilled line along the bottom edge is his own filing, not a museum label.

He was part of a group in Dresden that called itself the Bridge — apparently they shared a studio, painted their friends fast and cheap, and wanted nothing to do with the polite art of the day. It's said the group fell apart a year or so after this, partly over a history of it he wrote himself.

They say Corinth kept turning the brush on himself after a stroke nearly killed him in 1911, and this is one of the last self-portraits from near the end of his life.

Apparently this was one of a whole run of portraits made for the German merchants trading out of London around this time — I couldn't find much else specific to this one.

Nobody has ever agreed on what this is about, which hasn't stopped four hundred years of people having a go. The grid on the wall is a magic square — every row and column adds up to the same number, and the date's worked into the bottom row. It was apparently printed around the same time as two others that get treated as a matching set.

They say this kind of fine dress and direct stare was normally reserved for nobility — here it's just a painter claiming it for himself.

He painted this same set-up at least three times, from what I can find, swapping a woman in for one of the men in a later go. There's a story that he looked at the two of them in their old-fashioned German coats and said they were up to demagogic intrigues — supposedly a joke about how that kind of dress had become politically suspect to the authorities at the time.

He was one of a bunch of architecture students in Dresden who, they say, wanted painting faster and rawer than the academies allowed — supposedly they'd draw models in quarter-hour poses so nobody had time to get precious about it.