Sunday, January 19, 2020

Leibl and Sperl: Artistic Team


Wilhelm Leibl and Johann Sperl teamed up on nine paintings. Sperl (1840-1914) painted the landscape....

Detail of painting above
...and Leibl (1844-1900) contributed the figures. Here, a local man tells a hunter where to find his quarry.


This little grouping of figures worked so well that they placed them into another landscape.


According to a catalog of German painting, "Leibl and Sperl met when they were students, but a strong friendship developed only in 1873. Leibl left Munich that year and lived in a succession of Bavarian villages. After joint painting campaigns in 1875 and 1878, they lived and worked in Bad Aibling from 1881 to 1892."


In 1914, Sperl collapsed while painting a blooming meadow and died a few days before the outbreak of World War I. His final wish was to be buried next to his friend Leibl.
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Book: German Masters of the Nineteenth Century
Wikipedia: Wilhelm Leibl
Johann Sperl

1 comment:

Eugene Arenhaus said...

A similar 19th-century attempt by Shiskin and Savitsky, where Shishkin painted the pine thicket and Savitsky a family of bears, ended up in a bitter falling-out. Savitsky felt that his bears were what made the painting popular while patron-of-arts Tretyakov pushed for single authorship and went as far as to remove Savitsky's signature from the canvas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_in_a_Pine_Forest