Digging Potatoes

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Digging Potatoes
ca. 1930
Max Liebermann

This landscape sketch seems more like a free impression of nature than a finished painting, which is typical of Max Liebermann, main representative of Berlin Impressionism. The whole surface is covered with strong, free brush-strokes like relief squares in thick paint, mainly brown, green and grey.

Although the artist was under the influence of Dutch landscape painters of the 17th c. the relationship of land and light sky are the opposite of theirs in which the sky was the dominant feature. Here the dominance of the dark land gives the painting a heavy and closed effect, and the activity of digging potatoes is hardly more than suggested.